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The current paper studies sample-efficient Reinforcement Learning (RL) in settings where only the optimal value function is assumed to be linearly-realizable. It has recently been understood that, even under this seemingly strong assumption…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Philip Amortila , Nan Jiang , Dhruv Madeka , Dean P. Foster

Sampling-based motion planning is a well-established approach in autonomous driving, valued for its modularity and analytical tractability. In complex urban scenarios, however, uniform or heuristic sampling often produces many infeasible or…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Korbinian Moller , Roland Stroop , Mattia Piccinini , Alexander Langmann , Johannes Betz

Modern deep architectures often rely on large-scale datasets, but training on these datasets incurs high computational and storage overhead. Real-world datasets often contain substantial redundancies, prompting the need for more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Suorong Yang , Peijia Li , Furao Shen , Jian Zhao

In this paper, we leverage ideas from model-based control to address the sample efficiency problem of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Accelerating learning is an active field of RL highly relevant in the context of time-varying…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-05-23 Ibrahim Ahmed , Marcos Quinones-Grueiro , Gautam Biswas

We study the sample complexity of model-based reinforcement learning (henceforth RL) in general contextual decision processes that require strategic exploration to find a near-optimal policy. We design new algorithms for RL with a generic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Wen Sun , Nan Jiang , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Alekh Agarwal , John Langford

Sequential decision making, commonly formalized as Markov Decision Process (MDP) optimization, is a important challenge in artificial intelligence. Two key approaches to this problem are reinforcement learning (RL) and planning. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-01 Thomas M. Moerland , Joost Broekens , Aske Plaat , Catholijn M. Jonker

A promising way to improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning is model-based methods, in which many explorations and evaluations can happen in the learned models to save real-world samples. However, when the learned model has a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-14 Haoxin Lin , Yihao Sun , Jiaji Zhang , Yang Yu

The theory of reinforcement learning has focused on two fundamental problems: achieving low regret, and identifying $\epsilon$-optimal policies. While a simple reduction allows one to apply a low-regret algorithm to obtain an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Andrew Wagenmaker , Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson

Determining the most appropriate features for machine learning predictive models is challenging regarding performance and feature acquisition costs. In particular, global feature choice is limited given that some features will only benefit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Gabriel Bernardino , Anders Jonsson , Patrick Clarysse , Nicolas Duchateau

Distributionally Robust Reinforcement Learning (DR-RL) aims to derive a policy optimizing the worst-case performance within a predefined uncertainty set. Despite extensive research, previous DR-RL algorithms have predominantly favored…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Yudan Wang , Shaofeng Zou , Yue Wang

We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation, where the agent works in two phases: (1) in the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment but cannot access the reward; and (2) in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Junkai Zhang , Weitong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

We study three fundamental statistical-learning problems: distribution estimation, property estimation, and property testing. We establish the profile maximum likelihood (PML) estimator as the first unified sample-optimal approach to a wide…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-07-12 Yi Hao , Alon Orlitsky

Deep Reinforcement Learning has shown its ability in solving complicated problems directly from high-dimensional observations. However, in end-to-end settings, Reinforcement Learning algorithms are not sample-efficient and requires long…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Nicolò Botteghi , Mannes Poel , Beril Sirmacek , Christoph Brune

We apply reinforcement learning (RL) to robotics tasks. One of the drawbacks of traditional RL algorithms has been their poor sample efficiency. One approach to improve the sample efficiency is model-based RL. In our model-based RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Adithya Ramesh , Balaraman Ravindran

While much progress has been made in understanding the minimax sample complexity of reinforcement learning (RL) -- the complexity of learning on the "worst-case" instance -- such measures of complexity often do not capture the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Andrew Wagenmaker , Kevin Jamieson

The effectiveness of model-based versus model-free methods is a long-standing question in reinforcement learning (RL). Motivated by recent empirical success of RL on continuous control tasks, we study the sample complexity of popular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-05 Stephen Tu , Benjamin Recht

The aim of multi-task reinforcement learning is two-fold: (1) efficiently learn by training against multiple tasks and (2) quickly adapt, using limited samples, to a variety of new tasks. In this work, the tasks correspond to reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Nicholas C. Landolfi , Garrett Thomas , Tengyu Ma

We consider how model-based solvers can be leveraged to guide training of a universal policy to control from any feasible start state to any feasible goal in a contact-rich manipulation setting. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has…

Reinforcement learning is the method of choice to train models in sampling-based setups with binary outcome feedback, such as navigation, code generation, and mathematical problem solving. In such settings, models implicitly induce a…

This paper targets the efficient construction of a safety shield for decision making in scenarios that incorporate uncertainty. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are prominent models to capture such planning problems. Reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Nils Jansen , Bettina Könighofer , Sebastian Junges , Alexandru C. Serban , Roderick Bloem