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We present a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm to find an optimal policy for a finite-horizon Markov decision process while guaranteeing a desired lower bound on the probability of satisfying a signal temporal logic (STL)…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-09-29 Krishna C. Kalagarla , Rahul Jain , Pierluigi Nuzzo

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) works impressively in some environments and fails catastrophically in others. Ideally, RL theory should be able to provide an understanding of why this is, i.e. bounds predictive of practical performance.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Cassidy Laidlaw , Stuart Russell , Anca Dragan

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to learn optimal decisions in unknown environments through experience of taking actions and observing the rewards gained. In some cases, the environment is not influenced by the actions of the RL…

Imitation learning (IL) aims to mimic the behavior of an expert in a sequential decision making task by learning from demonstrations, and has been widely applied to robotics, autonomous driving, and autoregressive text generation. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Dylan J. Foster , Adam Block , Dipendra Misra

Reactive synthesis algorithms allow automatic construction of policies to control an environment modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) that are optimal with respect to high-level temporal logic specifications. However, they assume that…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Rajeev Alur , Suguman Bansal , Osbert Bastani , Kishor Jothimurugan

This paper is concerned with the problem of policy evaluation with linear function approximation in discounted infinite horizon Markov decision processes. We investigate the sample complexities required to guarantee a predefined estimation…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-03 Gen Li , Weichen Wu , Yuejie Chi , Cong Ma , Alessandro Rinaldo , Yuting Wei

In recent years, researchers have made significant progress in devising reinforcement-learning algorithms for optimizing linear temporal logic (LTL) objectives and LTL-like objectives. Despite these advancements, there are fundamental…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Cambridge Yang , Michael Littman , Michael Carbin

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) algorithms often rely on (forward) reinforcement learning or planning, over a given time horizon, to compute an approximately optimal policy for a hypothesized reward function; they then match this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Yiqing Xu , Finale Doshi-Velez , David Hsu

We study goal-conditioned RL through the lens of generalization, but not in the traditional sense of random augmentations and domain randomization. Rather, we aim to learn goal-directed policies that generalize with respect to the horizon:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-29 Vivek Myers , Catherine Ji , Benjamin Eysenbach

In this paper, we consider the problem of replicable realizable PAC learning. We construct a particularly hard learning problem and show a sample complexity lower bound with a close to $(\log|H|)^{3/2}$ dependence on the size of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Kasper Green Larsen , Markus Engelund Mathiasen , Chirag Pabbaraju , Clement Svendsen

We introduce the receding-horizon policy gradient (RHPG) algorithm, the first PG algorithm with provable global convergence in learning the optimal linear estimator designs, i.e., the Kalman filter (KF). Notably, the RHPG algorithm does not…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-12 Xiangyuan Zhang , Saviz Mowlavi , Mouhacine Benosman , Tamer Başar

We extend the standard reinforcement learning framework to random time horizons. While the classical setting typically assumes finite and deterministic or infinite runtimes of trajectories, we argue that multiple real-world applications…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Enric Ribera Borrell , Lorenz Richter , Christof Schütte

We study the $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-PAC policy identification problem in finite-horizon episodic Markov Decision Processes. Existing approaches provide finite-time guarantees for approximate settings ($\varepsilon>0$) but suffer from high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Cyrille Kone , Kevin Jamieson

We consider the problem of learning the optimal action-value function in the discounted-reward Markov decision processes (MDPs). We prove a new PAC bound on the sample-complexity of model-based value iteration algorithm in the presence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-03 Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar , Remi Munos , Bert Kappen

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

This work studies offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) in a class of non-Markovian environments called Regular Decision Processes (RDPs). In RDPs, the unknown dependency of future observations and rewards from the past interactions can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Ahana Deb , Roberto Cipollone , Anders Jonsson , Alessandro Ronca , Mohammad Sadegh Talebi

The theory of reinforcement learning has focused on two fundamental problems: achieving low regret, and identifying $\epsilon$-optimal policies. While a simple reduction allows one to apply a low-regret algorithm to obtain an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Andrew Wagenmaker , Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson

We study the problem of Reinforcement Learning (RL) with linear function approximation, i.e. assuming the optimal action-value function is linear in a known $d$-dimensional feature mapping. Unfortunately, however, based on only this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Zeyu Jia , Randy Jia , Dhruv Madeka , Dean P. Foster

This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi

Many interesting real world domains involve reinforcement learning (RL) in partially observable environments. Efficient learning in such domains is important, but existing sample complexity bounds for partially observable RL are at least…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-02 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Shayan Doroudi , Emma Brunskill