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A significant challenge for the practical application of reinforcement learning in the real world is the need to specify an oracle reward function that correctly defines a task. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to avoid this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-16 Kelvin Xu , Ellis Ratner , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

Bayesian Reinforcement Learning (RL) is capable of not only incorporating domain knowledge, but also solving the exploration-exploitation dilemma in a natural way. As Bayesian RL is intractable except for special cases, previous work has…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-06-14 Kenji Kawaguchi , Mauricio Araya

Offline reinforcement learning, which aims at optimizing sequential decision-making strategies with historical data, has been extensively applied in real-life applications. State-Of-The-Art algorithms usually leverage powerful function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Ming Yin , Mengdi Wang , Yu-Xiang Wang

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

Safety is critical when applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. As a result, safe RL has emerged as a fundamental and powerful paradigm for optimizing an agent's policy while incorporating notions of safety. A prevalent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Akifumi Wachi , Xun Shen , Yanan Sui

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of inferring the reward function of an agent, given its policy or observed behavior. Analogous to RL, IRL is perceived both as a problem and as a class of methods. By categorically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Saurabh Arora , Prashant Doshi

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems over general state and action spaces are notoriously challenging. In contrast to the tableau setting, one can not enumerate all the states and then iteratively update the policies for each state. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

This thesis rigorously studies fundamental reinforcement learning (RL) methods in modern practical considerations, including robust RL, distributional RL, and offline RL with neural function approximation. The thesis first prepares the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Thanh Nguyen-Tang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has gained substantial attention across diverse application domains and theoretical investigations. Existing literature on RL theory largely focuses on risk-neutral settings where the decision-maker learns to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Zhengqi Wu , Renyuan Xu

Reinforcement learning (RL) in large environments often suffers from severe computational bottlenecks, as conventional regret minimization algorithms require repeated, costly calls to planning and statistical estimation oracles. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Haichen Hu , Jian Qian , David Simchi-Levi

Reinforcement Learning (RL), bolstered by the expressive capabilities of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for function approximation, has demonstrated considerable success in numerous applications. However, its practicality in addressing various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-26 Aditya Mohan , Amy Zhang , Marius Lindauer

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is a powerful framework for learning complex behaviors from expert demonstrations. However, it traditionally requires repeatedly solving a computationally expensive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-09 David Wu , Gokul Swamy , J. Andrew Bagnell , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Sanjiban Choudhury

In various control task domains, existing controllers provide a baseline level of performance that -- though possibly suboptimal -- should be maintained. Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms that rely on extensive exploration of the state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Sheelabhadra Dey , Sumedh Pendurkar , Guni Sharon , Josiah P. Hanna

Reasoning abilities, especially those for solving complex math problems, are crucial components of general intelligence. Recent advances by proprietary companies, such as o-series models of OpenAI, have made remarkable progress on reasoning…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Lianghuan Huang , Sagnik Anupam , Insup Lee , Shuo Li , Osbert Bastani

Quantum control is concerned with the realisation of desired dynamics in quantum systems, serving as a linchpin for advancing quantum technologies and fundamental research. Analytic approaches and standard optimisation algorithms do not…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-05-29 Jan Ole Ernst , Aniket Chatterjee , Tim Franzmeyer , Axel Kuhn

Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems are being considered under increasingly more complex structures. While tabular and linear models have been thoroughly explored, the analytical study of RL under nonlinear function approximation,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Aya Kayal , Sattar Vakili , Laura Toni , Alberto Bernacchia

Reinforcement learning with function approximation has recently achieved tremendous results in applications with large state spaces. This empirical success has motivated a growing body of theoretical work proposing necessary and sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Daniel Kane , Sihan Liu , Shachar Lovett , Gaurav Mahajan

We study algorithms using randomized value functions for exploration in reinforcement learning. This type of algorithms enjoys appealing empirical performance. We show that when we use 1) a single random seed in each episode, and 2) a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Zhihan Xiong , Ruoqi Shen , Qiwen Cui , Maryam Fazel , Simon S. Du

We consider the problem of preference based reinforcement learning (PbRL), where, unlike traditional reinforcement learning, an agent receives feedback only in terms of a 1 bit (0/1) preference over a trajectory pair instead of absolute…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Aldo Pacchiano , Aadirupa Saha , Jonathan Lee