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Reinforcement learning (RL) struggles to scale to large, combinatorial action spaces common in many real-world problems. This paper introduces a novel framework for training discrete diffusion models as highly effective policies in these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Haitong Ma , Ofir Nabati , Aviv Rosenberg , Bo Dai , Oran Lang , Craig Boutilier , Na Li , Shie Mannor , Lior Shani , Guy Tenneholtz

Interest in reinforcement learning (RL) for large-scale systems, comprising extensive populations of intelligent agents interacting with heterogeneous environments, has surged significantly across diverse scientific domains in recent years.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-16 Wei Zhang , Jr-Shin Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central problem in artificial intelligence. This problem consists of defining artificial agents that can learn optimal behaviour by interacting with an environment -- where the optimal behaviour is defined…

Model-free deep reinforcement learning has been shown to exhibit good performance in domains ranging from video games to simulated robotic manipulation and locomotion. However, model-free methods are known to perform poorly when the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-20 Tuomas Haarnoja , Vitchyr Pong , Aurick Zhou , Murtaza Dalal , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

In the field of reinforcement learning there has been recent progress towards safety and high-confidence bounds on policy performance. However, to our knowledge, no practical methods exist for determining high-confidence policy performance…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-26 Daniel S. Brown , Scott Niekum

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

Model-based reinforcement learning methods learn a dynamics model with real data sampled from the environment and leverage it to generate simulated data to derive an agent. However, due to the potential distribution mismatch between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-29 Jian Shen , Han Zhao , Weinan Zhang , Yong Yu

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a promising framework for developing adaptive and data-driven strategies, enabling market makers to optimize decision-making policies based on interactions with the limit order book environment. This…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2026-02-17 Rafael Zimmer , Oswaldo Luiz do Valle Costa

We design a simple reinforcement learning (RL) agent that implements an optimistic version of $Q$-learning and establish through regret analysis that this agent can operate with some level of competence in any environment. While we leverage…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Shi Dong , Benjamin Van Roy , Zhengyuan Zhou

Stochastic resetting, where a dynamical process is intermittently returned to a fixed reference state, has emerged as a powerful mechanism for optimizing first-passage properties. Existing theory largely treats static, non-learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Jello Zhou , Vudtiwat Ngampruetikorn , David J. Schwab

Several recent works have been dedicated to unsupervised reinforcement learning in a single environment, in which a policy is first pre-trained with unsupervised interactions, and then fine-tuned towards the optimal policy for several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-17 Mirco Mutti , Mattia Mancassola , Marcello Restelli

Entropy regularization is used to get improved optimization performance in reinforcement learning tasks. A common form of regularization is to maximize policy entropy to avoid premature convergence and lead to more stochastic policies for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-12 Riashat Islam , Zafarali Ahmed , Doina Precup

We introduce PPOPT - Proximal Policy Optimization using Pretraining, a novel, model-free deep-reinforcement-learning algorithm that leverages pretraining to achieve high training efficiency and stability on very small training samples in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Ruoxing Yang

On-policy reinforcement learning methods, like Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), often demand extensive data per update, leading to sample inefficiency. This paper introduces Reflective Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Yaozhong Gan , Renye Yan , Zhe Wu , Junliang Xing

Reinforcement learning is a framework for learning to act sequentially in an unknown environment. We propose a natural approach for modeling policy structure in policy gradients. The key idea is to optimize for a subset of future rewards:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Puneet Mathur , Branislav Kveton , Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Viet Dac Lai

We study reward design strategies for incentivizing a reinforcement learning agent to adopt a policy from a set of admissible policies. The goal of the reward designer is to modify the underlying reward function cost-efficiently while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-07 Kiarash Banihashem , Adish Singla , Jiarui Gan , Goran Radanovic

Reinforcement learning studies how an agent should interact with an environment to maximize its cumulative reward. A standard way to study this question abstractly is to ask how many samples an agent needs from the environment to learn an…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-12-21 Daochen Wang , Aarthi Sundaram , Robin Kothari , Ashish Kapoor , Martin Roetteler

This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou

We study the problem of selecting a small, representative action subset from an extremely large action space shared across a family of reinforcement learning (RL) environments -- a fundamental challenge in applications like inventory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Quan Zhou , Shie Mannor

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) breaks through the bottlenecks of traditional reinforcement learning (RL) with the help of the perception capability of deep learning and has been widely applied in real-world problems.While model-free RL,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Tingting Zhao , Ying Wang , Wei Sun , Yarui Chen , Gang Niub , Masashi Sugiyama