English
Related papers

Related papers: Steady State Analysis of Episodic Reinforcement Le…

200 papers

Stochastic policies (also known as relaxed controls) are widely used in continuous-time reinforcement learning algorithms. However, executing a stochastic policy and evaluating its performance in a continuous-time environment remain open…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Yanwei Jia , Du Ouyang , Yufei Zhang

We present a theoretical study of continual and experiential learning in large language model agents that combine episodic memory with reinforcement learning. We argue that the key mechanism for continual adaptation, without updating model…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Jun Wang

Many problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL) seek an optimal policy with large discrete multidimensional yet unordered action spaces; these include problems in randomized allocation of resources such as placements of multiple security…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Changyu Chen , Ramesha Karunasena , Thanh Hong Nguyen , Arunesh Sinha , Pradeep Varakantham

This paper deals with distributed policy optimization in reinforcement learning, which involves a central controller and a group of learners. In particular, two typical settings encountered in several applications are considered:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Tianyi Chen , Kaiqing Zhang , Georgios B. Giannakis , Tamer Başar

Transfer and adaptation to new unknown environmental dynamics is a key challenge for reinforcement learning (RL). An even greater challenge is performing near-optimally in a single attempt at test time, possibly without access to dense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-14 Jiachen Yang , Brenden Petersen , Hongyuan Zha , Daniel Faissol

Stability is a basic requirement when studying the behavior of dynamical systems. However, stabilizing dynamical systems via reinforcement learning is challenging because only little data can be collected over short time horizons before…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-01 Steffen W. R. Werner , Benjamin Peherstorfer

We introduce a stochastic principal-agent model. A principal and an agent interact in a stochastic environment, each privy to observations about the state not available to the other. The principal has the power of commitment, both to elicit…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Jiarui Gan , Rupak Majumdar , Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic

We obtain global, non-asymptotic convergence guarantees for independent learning algorithms in competitive reinforcement learning settings with two agents (i.e., zero-sum stochastic games). We consider an episodic setting where in each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-13 Constantinos Daskalakis , Dylan J. Foster , Noah Golowich

As humans, our goals and our environment are persistently changing throughout our lifetime based on our experiences, actions, and internal and external drives. In contrast, typical reinforcement learning problem set-ups consider decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Annie Xie , James Harrison , Chelsea Finn

This work leverages adaptive social learning to estimate partially observable global states in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) problems. Unlike existing methods, the proposed approach enables the concurrent operation of social…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Ainur Zhaikhan , Malek Khammassi , Ali H. Sayed

This paper considers optimization problems over networks where agents have individual objectives to meet, or individual parameter vectors to estimate, subject to subspace constraints that require the objectives across the network to lie in…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-04-22 Roula Nassif , Stefan Vlaski , Ali H. Sayed

Real-world autonomous decision-making systems, from robots to recommendation engines, must operate in environments that change over time. While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown an impressive ability to learn optimal policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Jonathan Clifford Balloch

We consider the finite-horizon offline reinforcement learning (RL) setting, and are motivated by the challenge of learning the policy at any step h in dynamic programming (DP) algorithms. To learn this, it is sufficient to evaluate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Tanmay Gangwani , Sumeet Katariya , Branislav Kveton , Shrey Modi , Anshuka Rangi

We study data-driven learning of robust stochastic control for infinite-horizon systems with potentially continuous state and action spaces. In many managerial settings--supply chains, finance, manufacturing, services, and dynamic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Shengbo Wang , Jason Meng , Nian Si , Jose Blanchet , Zhengyuan Zhou

Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) has been proved to be a successful reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for continuous control tasks. However, DDPG still suffers from data insufficiency and training inefficiency, especially in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-05 Zhizheng Zhang , Jiale Chen , Zhibo Chen , Weiping Li

Emphatic algorithms are temporal-difference learning algorithms that change their effective state distribution by selectively emphasizing and de-emphasizing their updates on different time steps. Recent works by Sutton, Mahmood and White…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-07 A. Rupam Mahmood , Huizhen Yu , Martha White , Richard S. Sutton

Real-world applications require RL algorithms to act safely. During learning process, it is likely that the agent executes sub-optimal actions that may lead to unsafe/poor states of the system. Exploration is particularly brittle in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-17 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob , Jérémie Mary

This paper studies the operation of multi-agent networks engaged in multi-task decision problems under the paradigm of simultaneous learning and adaptation. Two scenarios are considered: one in which a decision must be taken among multiple…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-12-13 Stefano Marano , Ali H. Sayed

In sequential decision-making problems, Return-Conditioned Supervised Learning (RCSL) has gained increasing recognition for its simplicity and stability in modern decision-making tasks. Unlike traditional offline reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Zhishuai Liu , Yu Yang , Ruhan Wang , Pan Xu , Dongruo Zhou

The infinite horizon setting is widely adopted for problems of reinforcement learning (RL). These invariably result in stationary policies that are optimal. In many situations, finite horizon control problems are of interest and for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Soumyajit Guin , Shalabh Bhatnagar