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Recent studies show that deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents tend to overfit to the task on which they were trained and fail to adapt to minor environment changes. To expedite learning when transferring to unseen tasks, we propose a…
In this paper we consider reinforcement learning tasks with progressive rewards; that is, tasks where the rewards tend to increase in magnitude over time. We hypothesise that this property may be problematic for value-based deep…
Assignment problems are a classic combinatorial optimization problem in which a group of agents must be assigned to a group of tasks such that maximum utility is achieved while satisfying assignment constraints. Given the utility of each…
We study policy evaluation problems in multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) under a low-rank representation setting. In this setting, we are given $N$ learning tasks where the corresponding value function of these tasks lie in an…
Multi-step temporal difference (TD) learning is an important approach in reinforcement learning, as it unifies one-step TD learning with Monte Carlo methods in a way where intermediate algorithms can outperform either extreme. They address…
Gradient temporal difference (Gradient TD) algorithms are a popular class of stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms used for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. Here, we consider Gradient TD algorithms with an additional heavy…
In a broad class of reinforcement learning applications, stochastic rewards have heavy-tailed distributions, which lead to infinite second-order moments for stochastic (semi)gradients in policy evaluation and direct policy optimization. In…
Many continuous control problems can be formulated as sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. In principle, online RL methods can automatically explore the state space to solve each new task. However, discovering sequences of…
Large language model alignment via reinforcement learning depends critically on reward function quality. However, static, domain-specific reward models are often costly to train and exhibit poor generalization in out-of-distribution…
Deep reinforcement learning has enabled robots to learn motor skills from environmental interactions with minimal to no prior knowledge. However, existing reinforcement learning algorithms assume an episodic setting, in which the agent…
This paper revisits the temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm for the policy evaluation tasks in reinforcement learning. Typically, the performance of TD(0) and TD($\lambda$) is very sensitive to the choice of stepsizes. Oftentimes,…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is a cornerstone of reinforcement learning. In the average-reward setting, standard TD($\lambda$) is highly sensitive to the choice of step-size and thus requires careful tuning to maintain numerical…
Long-horizon agentic reasoning requires large language models to act over long interaction histories containing thoughts, tool calls, observations, and partial conclusions. The challenge is not merely that these histories grow long, but…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can find an optimal policy for a single agent to accomplish a particular task. However, many real-world problems require multiple agents to collaborate in order to achieve a common goal. For example, a…
Offline reinforcement learning algorithms promise to be applicable in settings where a fixed dataset is available and no new experience can be acquired. However, such formulation is inevitably offline-data-hungry and, in practice,…
Transfer learning is an important new subfield of multiagent reinforcement learning that aims to help an agent learn about a problem by using knowledge that it has gained solving another problem, or by using knowledge that is communicated…
In large-scale distributed machine learning, recent works have studied the effects of compressing gradients in stochastic optimization to alleviate the communication bottleneck. These works have collectively revealed that stochastic…
We study a class of reinforcement learning (RL) tasks where the objective of the agent is to accomplish temporally extended goals. In this setting, a common approach is to represent the tasks as deterministic finite automata (DFA) and…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the careful design of the reward function. However, accurately assigning rewards to each state-action pair in Long-Term Reinforcement Learning (LTRL) tasks remains a significant challenge. As a…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly developed as autonomous agents using reinforcement learning (agentic RL) that reason and act in interactive environments. However, sparse and sometimes unverifiable rewards make it extremely…