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This paper proposes a computationally tractable algorithm for learning infinite-horizon average-reward linear Markov decision processes (MDPs) and linear mixture MDPs under the Bellman optimality condition. While guaranteeing computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Woojin Chae , Dabeen Lee

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

The gloabal objective of inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is to estimate the unknown cost function of some MDP base on observed trajectories generated by (approximate) optimal policies. The classical approach consists in tuning this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-26 Firas Jarboui , Vianney Perchet

Recently, adversarial imitation learning has shown a scalable reward acquisition method for inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problems. However, estimated reward signals often become uncertain and fail to train a reliable statistical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-06 Dong-Sig Han , Hyunseo Kim , Hyundo Lee , Je-Hwan Ryu , Byoung-Tak Zhang

We study offline reinforcement learning under $Q^\star$-approximation and partial coverage, a setting that motivates practical algorithms such as Conservative $Q$-Learning (CQL; Kumar et al., 2020) but has received limited theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Haolin Liu , Braham Snyder , Chen-Yu Wei

Lagrangian methods are widely used algorithms for constrained optimization problems, but their learning dynamics exhibit oscillations and overshoot which, when applied to safe reinforcement learning, leads to constraint-violating behavior…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-09 Adam Stooke , Joshua Achiam , Pieter Abbeel

Gradient-based Bi-Level Optimization (BLO) methods have been widely applied to handle modern learning tasks. However, most existing strategies are theoretically designed based on restrictive assumptions (e.g., convexity of the lower-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Risheng Liu , Xuan Liu , Shangzhi Zeng , Jin Zhang , Yixuan Zhang

We study whether a risk-sensitive objective from asset-pricing theory -- recursive utility -- improves reinforcement learning for portfolio allocation. The Bellman equation under recursive utility involves a certainty equivalent (CE) of…

General Finance · Quantitative Finance 2026-03-25 Minkey Chang

We consider a new family of operators for reinforcement learning with the goal of alleviating the negative effects and becoming more robust to approximation or estimation errors. Various theoretical results are established, which include…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-29 Yingdong Lu , Mark S. Squillante , Chai Wah Wu

In a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP), the objective is to find the optimal value function, i.e., the value function corresponding to an optimal policy. This problem reduces to solving a functional equation known as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-17 Chandramouli Kamanchi , Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Representation learning is critical to the empirical and theoretical success of reinforcement learning. However, many existing methods are induced from model-learning aspects, misaligning them with the RL task in hand. This work introduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Ofir Nabati , Bo Dai , Shie Mannor , Guy Tennenholtz

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved impressive successes yet often requires a very large amount of interaction data. This result is perhaps unsurprising, as using complicated function approximation often requires more data to fit, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Jonathan N. Lee , Aldo Pacchiano , Vidya Muthukumar , Weihao Kong , Emma Brunskill

The recent work by Dong & Yang (2023) showed for misspecified sparse linear bandits, one can obtain an $O\left(\epsilon\right)$-optimal policy using a polynomial number of samples when the sparsity is a constant, where $\epsilon$ is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-19 Ally Yalei Du , Lin F. Yang , Ruosong Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown remarkable abilities in learning policies for decision-making tasks. However, RL is often hindered by issues such as low sample efficiency, lack of interpretability, and sparse supervision signals. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Xidong Feng , Ziyu Wan , Mengyue Yang , Ziyan Wang , Girish A. Koushik , Yali Du , Ying Wen , Jun Wang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) leverages previously collected data for policy optimization without any further active exploration. Despite the recent interest in this problem, its theoretical results in neural network function…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-15 Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Sunil Gupta , Hung Tran-The , Svetha Venkatesh

Multi-distribution learning (MDL), which seeks to learn a shared model that minimizes the worst-case risk across $k$ distinct data distributions, has emerged as a unified framework in response to the evolving demand for robustness,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Zihan Zhang , Wenhao Zhan , Yuxin Chen , Simon S. Du , Jason D. Lee

The classical theory of reinforcement learning (RL) has focused on tabular and linear representations of value functions. Further progress hinges on combining RL with modern function approximators such as kernel functions and deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Zhuoran Yang , Chi Jin , Zhaoran Wang , Mengdi Wang , Michael I. Jordan

Sample-efficiency guarantees for offline reinforcement learning (RL) often rely on strong assumptions on both the function classes (e.g., Bellman-completeness) and the data coverage (e.g., all-policy concentrability). Despite the recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-29 Wenhao Zhan , Baihe Huang , Audrey Huang , Nan Jiang , Jason D. Lee

Reinforcement learning algorithms, though successful, tend to over-fit to training environments hampering their application to the real-world. This paper proposes $\text{W}\text{R}^{2}\text{L}$ -- a robust reinforcement learning algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-18 Mohammed Amin Abdullah , Hang Ren , Haitham Bou Ammar , Vladimir Milenkovic , Rui Luo , Mingtian Zhang , Jun Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated its capability in solving various tasks but is notorious for its low sample efficiency. In this paper, we propose RLingua, a framework that can leverage the internal knowledge of large language…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-20 Liangliang Chen , Yutian Lei , Shiyu Jin , Ying Zhang , Liangjun Zhang