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This work extends the analysis of the theoretical results presented within the paper Is Q-Learning Provably Efficient? by Jin et al. We include a survey of related research to contextualize the need for strengthening the theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Kushagra Rastogi , Jonathan Lee , Fabrice Harel-Canada , Aditya Joglekar

In this study, we derive Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) bounds on the asymptotic sample-complexity for RL within the infinite-horizon Markov Decision Process (MDP) setting that are sharper than those in existing literature. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Mohit Prashant , Arvind Easwaran

Deep Q-Learning is an important reinforcement learning algorithm, which involves training a deep neural network, called Deep Q-Network (DQN), to approximate the well-known Q-function. Although wildly successful under laboratory conditions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Arunselvan Ramaswamy , Eyke Hüllermeier

Motivated by the study of $Q$-learning algorithms in reinforcement learning, we study a class of stochastic approximation procedures based on operators that satisfy monotonicity and quasi-contractivity conditions with respect to an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Martin J. Wainwright

$Q$-learning is one of the most fundamental reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Despite its widespread success in various applications, it is prone to overestimation bias in the $Q$-learning update. To address this issue, double…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Hyunjun Na , Donghwan Lee

This work presents the first finite-time analysis for the last-iterate convergence of average-reward $Q$-learning with an asynchronous implementation. A key feature of the algorithm we study is the use of adaptive stepsizes, which serve as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Zaiwei Chen , Phalguni Nanda

An overarching goal in machine learning is to build a generalizable model with few samples. To this end, overparameterization has been the subject of immense interest to explain the generalization ability of deep nets even when the size of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Yue Sun , Adhyyan Narang , Halil Ibrahim Gulluk , Samet Oymak , Maryam Fazel

Q-learning with function approximation could diverge in the off-policy setting and the target network is a powerful technique to address this issue. In this manuscript, we examine the sample complexity of the associated target Q-learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-23 Ziniu Li , Tian Xu , Yang Yu

We present an approach called Q-probing to adapt a pre-trained language model to maximize a task-specific reward function. At a high level, Q-probing sits between heavier approaches such as finetuning and lighter approaches such as few shot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Kenneth Li , Samy Jelassi , Hugh Zhang , Sham Kakade , Martin Wattenberg , David Brandfonbrener

An improvement of Q-learning is proposed in this paper. It is different from classic Q-learning in that the similarity between different states and actions is considered in the proposed method. During the training, a new updating mechanism…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-03 Wei Liao , Xiaohui Wei , Jizhou Lai

The paper introduces the first formulation of convex Q-learning for Markov decision processes with function approximation. The algorithms and theory rest on a relaxation of a dual of Manne's celebrated linear programming characterization of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-12 Fan Lu , Sean Meyn

Optimal trade execution is an important problem faced by essentially all traders. Much research into optimal execution uses stringent model assumptions and applies continuous time stochastic control to solve them. Here, we instead take a…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2020-06-09 Brian Ning , Franco Ho Ting Lin , Sebastian Jaimungal

This paper is concerned with the asynchronous form of Q-learning, which applies a stochastic approximation scheme to Markovian data samples. Motivated by the recent advances in offline reinforcement learning, we develop an algorithmic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Yuling Yan , Gen Li , Yuxin Chen , Jianqing Fan

Q-learning is a popular reinforcement learning algorithm. This algorithm has however been studied and analysed mainly in the infinite horizon setting. There are several important applications which can be modeled in the framework of finite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-09 Vivek VP , Dr. Shalabh Bhatnagar

For infinite-horizon average-cost criterion problems, there exist relatively few rigorous approximation and reinforcement learning results. In this paper, for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with standard Borel spaces, (i) we first provide…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-10 Ali Devran Kara , Serdar Yuksel

Q-learning is known as one of the fundamental reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Its convergence has been the focus of extensive research over the past several decades. Recently, a new finitetime error bound and analysis for Q-learning…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-01-17 Donghwna Lee

Large-scale multi-agent systems are often deployed across wide geographic areas, where agents interact with heterogeneous environments. There is an emerging interest in understanding the role of heterogeneity in the performance of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Leo Muxing Wang , Pengkun Yang , Lili Su

In this paper, for POMDPs, we provide the convergence of a Q learning algorithm for control policies using a finite history of past observations and control actions, and, consequentially, we establish near optimality of such limit Q…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Ali Devran Kara , Serdar Yuksel

We study the problem of zero-delay coding for the transmission of a Markov source over a noisy channel with feedback and present a reinforcement learning solution which is guaranteed to achieve near-optimality. To this end, we formulate the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-07 Liam Cregg , Fady Alajaji , Serdar Yuksel

In state of the art model-free off-policy deep reinforcement learning, a replay memory is used to store past experience and derive all network updates. Even if both state and action spaces are continuous, the replay memory only holds a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Sabrina Hoppe , Marc Toussaint