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Deep reinforcement learning (RL) is notoriously impractical to deploy due to sample inefficiency. Meta-RL directly addresses this sample inefficiency by learning to perform few-shot learning when a distribution of related tasks is available…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Jacob Beck , Risto Vuorio , Zheng Xiong , Shimon Whiteson

The optimal objective is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how policies are evaluated and optimized. While total return maximization is the ideal objective in RL, discounted return maximization is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Shuyu Yin , Fei Wen , Peilin Liu , Tao Luo

This paper studies the fundamental limits of reinforcement learning (RL) in the challenging \emph{partially observable} setting. While it is well-established that learning in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-03 Fan Chen , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Song Mei , Yu Bai

While most approaches to the problem of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) focus on estimating a reward function that best explains an expert agent's policy or demonstrated behavior on a control task, it is often the case that such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-01 Dexter R. R. Scobee , S. Shankar Sastry

Reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for data science decision-making but suffers from sample inefficiency, particularly in real-world scenarios with costly physical interactions. This paper introduces a novel human-inspired framework to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Ali Beikmohammadi , Sindri Magnússon

Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The state-of-the-art estimates the optimal action values while it usually involves an extensive search over the state-action space and unstable optimization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-27 Kaixiang Lin , Jiayu Zhou

Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems are being considered under increasingly more complex structures. While tabular and linear models have been thoroughly explored, the analytical study of RL under nonlinear function approximation,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Aya Kayal , Sattar Vakili , Laura Toni , Alberto Bernacchia

We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) based on the entropic risk measure. Although existing works have established non-asymptotic regret guarantees for this problem, they leave open an exponential gap between the upper and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-09 Yingjie Fei , Zhuoran Yang , Yudong Chen , Zhaoran Wang

We study the constrained reinforcement learning problem, in which an agent aims to maximize the expected cumulative reward subject to a constraint on the expected total value of a utility function. In contrast to existing model-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Arnob Ghosh , Xingyu Zhou , Ness Shroff

Reinforcement learning (RL) solves sequential decision-making problems via a trial-and-error process interacting with the environment. While RL achieves outstanding success in playing complex video games that allow huge trial-and-error,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Fan-Ming Luo , Tian Xu , Hang Lai , Xiong-Hui Chen , Weinan Zhang , Yang Yu

The performance of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters, with the learning rate being particularly influential. RL algorithms fail to reach convergence or demand an extensive number of samples…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Aida Afshar , Aldo Pacchiano

We study gap-dependent performance guarantees for nearly minimax-optimal algorithms in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation. While prior works have established gap-dependent regret bounds in this setting, existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-25 Haochen Zhang , Zhong Zheng , Lingzhou Xue

We study offline reinforcement learning in average-reward MDPs, which presents increased challenges from the perspectives of distribution shift and non-uniform coverage, and has been relatively underexamined from a theoretical perspective.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Matthew Zurek , Guy Zamir , Yudong Chen

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) -- the problem of learning reward functions from demonstrations of an \emph{expert policy} -- plays a critical role in developing intelligent systems. While widely used in applications, theoretical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-13 Lei Zhao , Mengdi Wang , Yu Bai

Sampling-based motion planning is a well-established approach in autonomous driving, valued for its modularity and analytical tractability. In complex urban scenarios, however, uniform or heuristic sampling often produces many infeasible or…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Korbinian Moller , Roland Stroop , Mattia Piccinini , Alexander Langmann , Johannes Betz

Understanding emerging behaviors of reinforcement learning (RL) agents may be difficult since such agents are often trained in complex environments using highly complex decision making procedures. This has given rise to a variety of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-12-02 Mira Finkelstein , Lucy Liu , Nitsan Levy Schlot , Yoav Kolumbus , David C. Parkes , Jeffrey S. Rosenshein , Sarah Keren

Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DR-RL) has recently gained significant attention as a principled approach that addresses discrepancies between training and testing environments. To balance robustness, conservatism, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Zhenghao Li , Shengbo Wang , Nian Si

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) can acquire complex behaviors from low-level inputs, such as images. However, real-world applications of such methods require generalizing to the vast variability of the real world. Deep networks are known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-13 Chelsea Finn , Tianhe Yu , Justin Fu , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Multitask Representation Learning (MRL) has emerged as a prevalent technique to improve sample efficiency in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Empirical studies have found that training agents on multiple tasks simultaneously within online and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Rui Lu , Yang Yue , Andrew Zhao , Simon Du , Gao Huang

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao