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Multi-distribution learning generalizes the classic PAC learning to handle data coming from multiple distributions. Given a set of $k$ data distributions and a hypothesis class of VC dimension $d$, the goal is to learn a hypothesis that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Binghui Peng

Low-complexity models such as linear function representation play a pivotal role in enabling sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL). The current paper pertains to a scenario with value-based linear representation, which postulates the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Gen Li , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi , Yuantao Gu , Yuting Wei

Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms with neural network function parameterization have well-established empirical success in many practical large-scale reinforcement learning tasks. However, theoretical understanding of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Zhifa Ke , Zaiwen Wen , Junyu Zhang

In this paper, we present a framework to understand the convergence of commonly used Q-learning reinforcement learning algorithms in practice. Two salient features of such algorithms are: (i)~the Q-table is recursively updated using an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Amit Sinha , Matthieu Geist , Aditya Mahajan

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning promises, among other benefits, to efficiently capture and utilize the temporal structure of a decision-making problem and to enhance continual learning capabilities, but theoretical guarantees lag behind…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Massimiliano Manenti , Andrea Iannelli

We consider model-free reinforcement learning for infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with a continuous state space and unknown transition kernel, when only a single sample path under an arbitrary policy of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-24 Devavrat Shah , Qiaomin Xie

The $Q$-learning algorithm is a simple and widely-used stochastic approximation scheme for reinforcement learning, but the basic protocol can exhibit instability in conjunction with function approximation. Such instability can be observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Andrea Zanette , Martin J. Wainwright

The curse of dimensionality is a widely known issue in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular setting where the state space $\mathcal{S}$ and the action space $\mathcal{A}$ are both finite, to obtain a nearly optimal policy with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Bingyan Wang , Yuling Yan , Jianqing Fan

In this paper, we introduce a unified framework for analyzing a large family of Q-learning algorithms, based on switching system perspectives and ODE-based stochastic approximation. We show that the nonlinear ODE models associated with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-18 Donghwan Lee , Niao He

We study the problem of PAC learning $\gamma$-margin halfspaces with Random Classification Noise. We establish an information-computation tradeoff suggesting an inherent gap between the sample complexity of the problem and the sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Ilias Diakonikolas , Jelena Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Puqian Wang , Nikos Zarifis

We study the sample complexity of learning threshold functions under the constraint of differential privacy. It is assumed that each labeled example in the training data is the information of one individual and we would like to come up with…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-11-25 Haim Kaplan , Katrina Ligett , Yishay Mansour , Moni Naor , Uri Stemmer

Sample complexity bounds are a common performance metric in the Reinforcement Learning literature. In the discounted cost, infinite horizon setting, all of the known bounds have a factor that is a polynomial in $1/(1-\gamma)$, where $\gamma…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-09 Adithya M. Devraj , Sean P. Meyn

We present a federated learning framework that is designed to robustly deliver good predictive performance across individual clients with heterogeneous data. The proposed approach hinges upon a superquantile-based learning objective that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-04 Krishna Pillutla , Yassine Laguel , Jérôme Malick , Zaid Harchaoui

Time-inhomogeneous finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDP) are frequently employed to model decision-making in dynamic treatment regimes and other statistical reinforcement learning (RL) scenarios. These fields, especially healthcare…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Elynn Chen , Sai Li , Michael I. Jordan

We revisit the fundamental problem of learning Axis-Aligned-Rectangles over a finite grid $X^d\subseteq{\mathbb{R}}^d$ with differential privacy. Existing results show that the sample complexity of this problem is at most $\min\left\{…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Menachem Sadigurschi , Uri Stemmer

One of the goals of natural language understanding is to develop models that map sentences into meaning representations. However, training such models requires expensive annotation of complex structures, which hinders their adoption.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-10-08 Omri Koshorek , Gabriel Stanovsky , Yichu Zhou , Vivek Srikumar , Jonathan Berant

Learning and planning in partially-observable domains is one of the most difficult problems in reinforcement learning. Traditional methods consider these two problems as independent, resulting in a classical two-stage paradigm: first learn…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-25 Tianyu Li , Bogdan Mazoure , Doina Precup , Guillaume Rabusseau

Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DRRL) focuses on designing policies that achieve good performance under model uncertainties. The goal is to maximize the worst-case long-term discounted reward, where the data for RL comes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Saptarshi Mandal , Yashaswini Murthy , R. Srikant

The problem of sample complexity of online reinforcement learning is often studied in the literature without taking into account any partial knowledge about the system dynamics that could potentially accelerate the learning process. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Meshal Alharbi , Mardavij Roozbehani , Munther Dahleh

In this paper, we investigate the sample complexity of policy evaluation in infinite-horizon offline reinforcement learning (also known as the off-policy evaluation problem) with linear function approximation. We identify a hard regime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Lin Chen , Bruno Scherrer , Peter L. Bartlett