English
Related papers

Related papers: Bellman Eluder Dimension: New Rich Classes of RL P…

200 papers

Many AI problems, in robotics and other domains, are goal-based, essentially seeking trajectories leading to various goal states. Reinforcement learning (RL), building on Bellman's optimality equation, naturally optimizes for a single goal,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-12-22 Tom Jurgenson , Or Avner , Edward Groshev , Aviv Tamar

In this paper, we consider the problem of online learning of Markov decision processes (MDPs) with very large state spaces. Under the assumptions of realizable function approximation and low Bellman ranks, we develop an online learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Kefan Dong , Jian Peng , Yining Wang , Yuan Zhou

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is considered to be a promising approach to reduce the sample complexity that hinders model-free RL. However, the theoretical understanding of such methods has been rather limited. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yuping Luo , Huazhe Xu , Yuanzhi Li , Yuandong Tian , Trevor Darrell , Tengyu Ma

In this paper, we propose a novel Branching Reinforcement Learning (Branching RL) model, and investigate both Regret Minimization (RM) and Reward-Free Exploration (RFE) metrics for this model. Unlike standard RL where the trajectory of each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Yihan Du , Wei Chen

This paper aims at the algorithmic/theoretical core of reinforcement learning (RL) by introducing the novel class of proximal Bellman mappings. These mappings are defined in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs), to benefit from the…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-15 Yuki Akiyama , Konstantinos Slavakis

In reward-free reinforcement learning (RL), an agent explores the environment first without any reward information, in order to achieve certain learning goals afterwards for any given reward. In this paper we focus on reward-free RL under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Yuan Cheng , Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

We study the problem of computing the value function from a discretely-observed trajectory of a continuous-time diffusion process. We develop a new class of algorithms based on easily implementable numerical schemes that are compatible with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Wenlong Mou , Yuhua Zhu

This work introduces Bilinear Classes, a new structural framework, which permit generalization in reinforcement learning in a wide variety of settings through the use of function approximation. The framework incorporates nearly all existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Simon S. Du , Sham M. Kakade , Jason D. Lee , Shachar Lovett , Gaurav Mahajan , Wen Sun , Ruosong Wang

Black-box optimization (BBO) addresses problems where objectives are accessible only through costly queries without gradients or explicit structure. Classical derivative-free methods -- line search, direct search, and model-based solvers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Morteza Kimiaei , Vyacheslav Kungurtsev

In many real-world settings, reinforcement learning systems suffer performance degradation when the environment encountered at deployment differs from that observed during training. Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DR-RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Debamita Ghosh , George K. Atia , Yue Wang

Achieving fast and stable off-policy learning in deep reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging. Most existing methods rely on semi-gradient temporal-difference (TD) methods for their simplicity and efficiency, but are consequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Esraa Elelimy , Brett Daley , Andrew Patterson , Marlos C. Machado , Adam White , Martha White

We study the problem of learning optimal policies in finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) using low-rank reinforcement learning (RL) methods. In finite-horizon MDPs, the policies, and therefore the value functions (VFs) are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Sergio Rozada , Jose Luis Orejuela , Antonio G. Marques

The use of Reinforcement Learning in real-world scenarios is strongly limited by issues of scale. Most RL learning algorithms are unable to deal with problems composed of hundreds or sometimes even dozens of possible actions, and therefore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-02 Gabriel Dulac-Arnold , Ludovic Denoyer , Philippe Preux , Patrick Gallinari

A major challenge of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world applications is the variation between environments, tasks or clients. Meta-RL (MRL) addresses this issue by learning a meta-policy that adapts to new tasks. Standard MRL methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Ido Greenberg , Shie Mannor , Gal Chechik , Eli Meirom

We study sample efficient reinforcement learning (RL) under the general framework of interactive decision making, which includes Markov decision process (MDP), partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), and predictive state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-03 Han Zhong , Wei Xiong , Sirui Zheng , Liwei Wang , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Tong Zhang

In the past decade, model-free reinforcement learning (RL) has provided solutions to challenging domains such as robotics. Model-based RL shows the prospect of being more sample-efficient than model-free methods in terms of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-14 John McLeod , Hrvoje Stojic , Vincent Adam , Dongho Kim , Jordi Grau-Moya , Peter Vrancx , Felix Leibfried

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the task of finding a reward function that generates a desired optimal policy for a given Markov Decision Process (MDP). This paper develops an information-theoretic lower bound for the sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-07 Abi Komanduru , Jean Honorio

While originally developed for continuous control problems, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has emerged as the work-horse of a variety of reinforcement learning (RL) applications, including the fine-tuning of generative models.…

We study the problem of Reinforcement Learning (RL) with linear function approximation, i.e. assuming the optimal action-value function is linear in a known $d$-dimensional feature mapping. Unfortunately, however, based on only this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Zeyu Jia , Randy Jia , Dhruv Madeka , Dean P. Foster

We propose a novel algorithmic framework for distributional reinforcement learning, based on learning finite-dimensional mean embeddings of return distributions. We derive several new algorithms for dynamic programming and…