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Despite rapid progress in theoretical reinforcement learning (RL) over the last few years, most of the known guarantees are worst-case in nature, failing to take advantage of structure that may be known a priori about a given RL problem at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra

Reinforcement learning (RL) for exponential-utility optimization in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) lacks principled value-based algorithms. We address this gap in the fixed risk-aversion setting. Building on the Bellman-type…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Gugan Thoppe , L. A. Prashanth , Ankur Naskar , Sanjay Bhat

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

One common approach to solve multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) problems is to extend conventional Q-learning by using vector Q-values in combination with a utility function. However issues can arise with this approach in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Kewen Ding , Peter Vamplew , Cameron Foale , Richard Dazeley

Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found tremendous success in simulated domains, they often cannot directly be applied to physical systems, especially in cases where there are hard constraints to satisfy (e.g. on safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-28 Harsh Satija , Philip Amortila , Joelle Pineau

We study a Q learning algorithm for continuous time stochastic control problems. The proposed algorithm uses the sampled state process by discretizing the state and control action spaces under piece-wise constant control processes. We show…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-10 Erhan Bayraktar , Ali Devran Kara

We address the problem of estimating a high-dimensional matrix from linear measurements, with a focus on designing optimal rank-adaptive algorithms. These algorithms infer the matrix by estimating its singular values and the corresponding…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Frédéric Zheng , Yassir Jedra , Alexandre Proutiere

Given a list of behaviors and associated parameterized controllers for solving different individual tasks, we study the problem of selecting an optimal sequence of coordinated behaviors in multi-robot systems for completing a given mission,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-09-16 Pietro Pierpaoli , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg , Magnus Egerstedt

Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs), or the so-called variational quantum circuits, are important quantum applications both because of their similar promises as classical neural networks and because of the feasibility of their implementation on…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-10-07 Xuchen You , Xiaodi Wu

We consider the reinforcement learning problem for the constrained Markov decision process (CMDP), which plays a central role in satisfying safety or resource constraints in sequential learning and decision-making. In this problem, we are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Jiashuo Jiang , Yinyu Ye

Various methods for solving the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem have been developed independently in machine learning and economics. In particular, the method of Maximum Causal Entropy IRL is based on the perspective of entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-05 Navyata Sanghvi , Shinnosuke Usami , Mohit Sharma , Joachim Groeger , Kris Kitani

We study the problem of estimating the fixed point of a contractive operator defined on a separable Banach space. Focusing on a stochastic query model that provides noisy evaluations of the operator, we analyze a variance-reduced stochastic…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-11-30 Wenlong Mou , Koulik Khamaru , Martin J. Wainwright , Peter L. Bartlett , Michael I. Jordan

Q-functions are widely used in discrete-time learning and control to model future costs arising from a given control policy, when the initial state and input are given. Although some of their properties are understood, Q-functions…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-21 Joseph Warrington

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

Learning near-optimal behaviour from an expert's demonstrations typically relies on the assumption that the learner knows the features that the true reward function depends on. In this paper, we study the problem of learning from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-28 Luis Haug , Sebastian Tschiatschek , Adish Singla

Reinforcement learning techniques achieved human-level performance in several tasks in the last decade. However, in recent years, the need for interpretability emerged: we want to be able to understand how a system works and the reasons…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-13 Leonardo Lucio Custode , Giovanni Iacca

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 develop a stochastic approximation-type algorithm to solve finite state/action, infinite-horizon, risk-aware Markov decision processes. Our algorithm has two loops. The inner loop computes the risk by solving a stochastic saddle-point…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-12-05 Wenjie Huang , William B. Haskell

This paper introduces an approach to Reinforcement Learning Algorithm by comparing their immediate rewards using a variation of Q-Learning algorithm. Unlike the conventional Q-Learning, the proposed algorithm compares current reward with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2010-09-15 Punit Pandey , Deepshikha Pandey , Shishir Kumar

In complex environments with large discrete action spaces, effective decision-making is critical in reinforcement learning (RL). Despite the widespread use of value-based RL approaches like Q-learning, they come with a computational burden,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Fares Fourati , Vaneet Aggarwal , Mohamed-Slim Alouini