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We consider reinforcement learning in changing Markov Decision Processes where both the state-transition probabilities and the reward functions may vary over time. For this problem setting, we propose an algorithm using a sliding window…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-28 Pratik Gajane , Ronald Ortner , Peter Auer

Policy gradient methods have shown success in learning control policies for high-dimensional dynamical systems. Their biggest downside is the amount of exploration they require before yielding high-performing policies. In a lifelong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Jorge A. Mendez , Boyu Wang , Eric Eaton

With reinforcement learning, an agent could learn complex behaviors from high-level abstractions of the task. However, exploration and reward shaping remained challenging for existing methods, especially in scenarios where the extrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Jie Chen , Wenjun Xu

Multi-objective Markov decision processes are sequential decision-making problems that involve multiple conflicting reward functions that cannot be optimized simultaneously without a compromise. This type of problems cannot be solved by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Sherif Abdelfattah , Kathryn Merrick , Jiankun Hu

Policy gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning. Yet, the nonconvexity of policy optimization poses significant challenges in understanding the global convergence of policy gradient methods. For a class of finite-horizon…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Xin Chen , Yifan Hu , Minda Zhao

We consider policy evaluation in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision problems (MDPs) with infinite spaces. We reformulate this task a compositional stochastic program with a function-valued decision variable that belongs to a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-05-19 Alec Koppel , Garrett Warnell , Ethan Stump , Peter Stone , Alejandro Ribeiro

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) systems with general goals beyond a cumulative sum of rewards have gained traction, such as in constrained problems, exploration, and acting upon prior experiences. In this paper, we consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-07 Junyu Zhang , Alec Koppel , Amrit Singh Bedi , Csaba Szepesvari , Mengdi Wang

In this work, we present a reinforcement learning algorithm that can find a variety of policies (novel policies) for a task that is given by a task reward function. Our method does this by creating a second reward function that recognizes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-03 Yunbo Zhang , Wenhao Yu , Greg Turk

Policy gradient methods are extensively used in reinforcement learning as a way to optimize expected return. In this paper, we explore the evolution of the policy parameters, for a special class of exactly solvable POMDPs, as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Gavin McCracken , Colin Daniels , Rosie Zhao , Anna Brandenberger , Prakash Panangaden , Doina Precup

Reinforcement learning, mathematically described by Markov Decision Problems, may be approached either through dynamic programming or policy search. Actor-critic algorithms combine the merits of both approaches by alternating between steps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Harshat Kumar , Alec Koppel , Alejandro Ribeiro

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for multi-objective decision-making, where the agent seeks to optimize a vector of rewards rather than a single scalar value. The objective is to ensure that the time-averaged reward vector…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-18 Rahul Misra , Manuela L. Bujorianu , Rafał Wisniewski

Relational Markov Decision Processes are a useful abstraction for complex reinforcement learning problems and stochastic planning problems. Recent work developed representation schemes and algorithms for planning in such problems using the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-06-26 Chenggang Wang , Roni Khardon

Reinforcement learning algorithms describe how an agent can learn an optimal action policy in a sequential decision process, through repeated experience. In a given environment, the agent policy provides him some running and terminal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-03-24 Arthur Charpentier , Romuald Elie , Carl Remlinger

We study offline reinforcement learning problems with a long-run average reward objective. The state-action pairs generated by any fixed behavioral policy thus follow a Markov chain, and the {\em empirical} state-action-next-state…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-18 Mengmeng Li , Daniel Kuhn , Tobias Sutter

Reinforcement learning is essential for neural architecture search and hyperparameter optimization, but the conventional approaches impede widespread use due to prohibitive time and computational costs. Inspired by DeepSeek-V3 multi-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Zheng Li , Jerry Cheng , Huanying Helen Gu

Finding optimal policies which maximize long term rewards of Markov Decision Processes requires the use of dynamic programming and backward induction to solve the Bellman optimality equation. However, many real-world problems require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal

We study policy gradient (PG) for reinforcement learning in continuous time and space under the regularized exploratory formulation developed by Wang et al. (2020). We represent the gradient of the value function with respect to a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Yanwei Jia , Xun Yu Zhou

Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms are among the best candidates for the much-anticipated applications of reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, such as robotics. However, the trial-and-error nature of these methods poses safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Matteo Papini , Matteo Pirotta , Marcello Restelli

While there is an extensive body of research analyzing policy gradient methods for discounted cumulative-reward MDPs, prior work on policy gradient methods for average-reward MDPs has been limited, with most existing results restricted to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-23 Jongmin Lee , Ernest K. Ryu

We propose a comprehensive framework for policy gradient methods tailored to continuous time reinforcement learning. This is based on the connection between stochastic control problems and randomised problems, enabling applications across…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-01 Robert Denkert , Huyên Pham , Xavier Warin