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The field of quickest change detection (QCD) focuses on the design and analysis of online algorithms that estimate the time at which a significant event occurs. In this paper, design and analysis are cast in a Bayesian framework, where QCD…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-30 Austin Cooper , Sean Meyn

When the data used for reinforcement learning (RL) are collected by multiple agents in a distributed manner, federated versions of RL algorithms allow collaborative learning without the need for agents to share their local data. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Jiin Woo , Gauri Joshi , Yuejie Chi

The problem of sample complexity of online reinforcement learning is often studied in the literature without taking into account any partial knowledge about the system dynamics that could potentially accelerate the learning process. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Meshal Alharbi , Mardavij Roozbehani , Munther Dahleh

Q-learning suffers from overestimation bias, because it approximates the maximum action value using the maximum estimated action value. Algorithms have been proposed to reduce overestimation bias, but we lack an understanding of how bias…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-10 Qingfeng Lan , Yangchen Pan , Alona Fyshe , Martha White

Q-Learning is a fundamental off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that has the objective of approximating action-value functions in order to learn optimal policies. Nonetheless, it has difficulties in reconciling bias with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-22 Mahammad Humayoo

In Reinforcement Learning the Q-learning algorithm provably converges to the optimal solution. However, as others have demonstrated, Q-learning can also overestimate the values and thereby spend too long exploring unhelpful states. Double…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-16 David Barber

Soft Q-learning is a variation of Q-learning designed to solve entropy regularized Markov decision problems where an agent aims to maximize the entropy regularized value function. Despite its empirical success, there have been limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Narim Jeong , Donghwan Lee

MinMaxMin $Q$-learning is a novel optimistic Actor-Critic algorithm that addresses the problem of overestimation bias ($Q$-estimations are overestimating the real $Q$-values) inherent in conservative RL algorithms. Its core formula relies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Nitsan Soffair , Shie Mannor

The practicality of reinforcement learning algorithms has been limited due to poor scaling with respect to the problem size, as the sample complexity of learning an $\epsilon$-optimal policy is $\tilde{\Omega}\left(|S||A|H^3 /…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Tyler Sam , Yudong Chen , Christina Lee Yu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a classical tool to solve network control or policy optimization problems in unknown environments. The original Q-learning suffers from performance and complexity challenges across very large networks. Herein,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Talha Bozkus , Urbashi Mitra

We present the first regret bound for classical online Q-learning in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs), without relying on optimism or bonus terms. We first analyze Boltzmann Q-learning with decaying temperature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Rahul Singh , Siddharth Chandak , Eric Moulines , Vivek S. Borkar , Nicholas Bambos

Offline or batch reinforcement learning seeks to learn a near-optimal policy using history data without active exploration of the environment. To counter the insufficient coverage and sample scarcity of many offline datasets, the principle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Laixi Shi , Gen Li , Yuting Wei , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi

The Q-learning algorithm is known to be affected by the maximization bias, i.e. the systematic overestimation of action values, an important issue that has recently received renewed attention. Double Q-learning has been proposed as an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-03 Rong Zhu , Mattia Rigotti

Achieving convergence of multiple learning agents in general $N$-player games is imperative for the development of safe and reliable machine learning (ML) algorithms and their application to autonomous systems. Yet it is known that, outside…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-01-24 Aamal Abbas Hussain , Francesco Belardinelli , Georgios Piliouras

The $Q$-learning algorithm is a simple and widely-used stochastic approximation scheme for reinforcement learning, but the basic protocol can exhibit instability in conjunction with function approximation. Such instability can be observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Andrea Zanette , Martin J. Wainwright

We consider the optimal sample complexity theory of tabular reinforcement learning (RL) for maximizing the infinite horizon discounted reward in a Markov decision process (MDP). Optimal worst-case complexity results have been developed for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Shengbo Wang , Jose Blanchet , Peter Glynn

Reinforcement learning studies how an agent should interact with an environment to maximize its cumulative reward. A standard way to study this question abstractly is to ask how many samples an agent needs from the environment to learn an…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-12-21 Daochen Wang , Aarthi Sundaram , Robin Kothari , Ashish Kapoor , Martin Roetteler

In Markov decision processes (MDPs), quantile risk measures such as Value-at-Risk are a standard metric for modeling RL agents' preferences for certain outcomes. This paper proposes a new Q-learning algorithm for quantile optimization in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Jia Lin Hau , Erick Delage , Esther Derman , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Marek Petrik

The development of machine learning algorithms has been gathering relevance to address the increasing modelling complexity of manufacturing decision-making problems. Reinforcement learning is a methodology with great potential due to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-18 Miguel Neves , Miguel Vieira , Pedro Neto

Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DRRL) focuses on designing policies that achieve good performance under model uncertainties. The goal is to maximize the worst-case long-term discounted reward, where the data for RL comes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Saptarshi Mandal , Yashaswini Murthy , R. Srikant