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In real-world scenarios, the application of reinforcement learning is significantly challenged by complex non-stationarity. Most existing methods attempt to model changes in the environment explicitly, often requiring impractical prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Wanpeng Zhang , Yilin Li , Boyu Yang , Zongqing Lu

A reliable reward model is essential for aligning large language models with human preferences through reinforcement learning from human feedback. However, standard reward models are susceptible to spurious features that are not causally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yupei Yang , Lin Yang , Wanxi Deng , Lin Qu , Fan Feng , Biwei Huang , Shikui Tu , Lei Xu

Why do reinforcement learning (RL) policies fail or succeed? This is a challenging question due to the complex, high-dimensional nature of agent-environment interactions. In this work, we take a causal perspective on explaining the behavior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-22 Armin Kekić , Jan Schneider , Dieter Büchler , Bernhard Schölkopf , Michel Besserve

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) provides a promising avenue for training policies from pre-collected datasets when gathering additional interaction data is infeasible. However, existing offline RL methods often assume stationarity or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Suzan Ece Ada , Georg Martius , Emre Ugur , Erhan Oztop

As humans, our goals and our environment are persistently changing throughout our lifetime based on our experiences, actions, and internal and external drives. In contrast, typical reinforcement learning problem set-ups consider decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Annie Xie , James Harrison , Chelsea Finn

Reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic, factored Markov decision processes (FMDPs) is studied. We propose an algorithm called FMDP-BF, which leverages the factorization structure of FMDP. The regret of FMDP-BF is shown to be exponentially…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-11 Xiaoyu Chen , Jiachen Hu , Lihong Li , Liwei Wang

When Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents are deployed in practice, they might impact their environment and change its dynamics. We propose a new framework to model this phenomenon, where the current environment depends on the deployed policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Ben Rank , Stelios Triantafyllou , Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic

Reinforcement learning (RL) under changing environment models many real-world applications via nonstationary Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), and hence gains considerable interest. However, theoretical studies on nonstationary MDPs in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-11 Yuan Cheng , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

The real world is inherently non-stationary, with ever-changing factors, such as weather conditions and traffic flows, making it challenging for agents to adapt to varying environmental dynamics. Non-Stationary Reinforcement Learning (NSRL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Min Wang , Xin Li , Ye He , Yao-Hui Li , Hasnaa Bennis , Riashat Islam , Mingzhong Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has transformed sequential decision making, yet traditional algorithms like Deep Q-Networks (DQNs) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) often struggle with efficient exploration, stability, and adaptability in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Umberto Gonçalves de Sousa

Reinforcement Learning (RL) faces significant challenges in adaptive healthcare interventions, such as dementia care, where data is scarce, decisions require interpretability, and underlying patient-state dynamic are complex and causal in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Wenzheng Zhao , Ran Zhang , Ruth Palan Lopez , Shu-Fen Wung , Fengpei Yuan

Modern reinforcement learning (RL) struggles to capture real-world cause-and-effect dynamics, leading to inefficient exploration due to extensive trial-and-error actions. While recent efforts to improve agent exploration have leveraged…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Minh Hoang Nguyen , Hung Le , Svetha Venkatesh

We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) based on an entropic risk measure in episodic non-stationary Markov decision processes (MDPs). Both the reward functions and the state transition kernels are unknown and allowed to vary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Yuhao Ding , Ming Jin , Javad Lavaei

A hallmark of intelligence is the ability to adapt in non-stationary environments, yet deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle in such settings. Prior studies introduce non-stationarity through abrupt shifts in features or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Raymond Chua , Doina Precup , Blake Richards

We consider the problem of non-stationary reinforcement learning (RL) in the infinite-horizon average-reward setting. We model it by a Markov Decision Process with time-varying rewards and transition probabilities, with a variation budget…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Neharika Jali , Eshika Pathak , Pranay Sharma , Guannan Qu , Gauri Joshi

Contextual bandit algorithms are extremely popular and widely used in recommendation systems to provide online personalised recommendations. A recurrent assumption is the stationarity of the reward function, which is rather unrealistic in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-04-29 Giuseppe Di Benedetto , Vito Bellini , Giovanni Zappella

We study reinforcement learning (RL) with no-reward demonstrations, a setting in which an RL agent has access to additional data from the interaction of other agents with the same environment. However, it has no access to the rewards or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-11 Angelos Filos , Clare Lyle , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine , Natasha Jaques , Gregory Farquhar

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a naturalistic framing for learning through trial and error, which is appealing both because of its simplicity and effectiveness and because of its resemblance to how humans and animals acquire skills…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-09 Archit Sharma , Kelvin Xu , Nikhil Sardana , Abhishek Gupta , Karol Hausman , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

Large language models (LLMs) excel at mathematical reasoning and logical problem-solving. The current popular training paradigms primarily use supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the models' reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Jack Chen , Fazhong Liu , Naruto Liu , Yuhan Luo , Erqu Qin , Harry Zheng , Tian Dong , Haojin Zhu , Yan Meng , Xiao Wang

Representation learning is a central challenge across a range of machine learning areas. In reinforcement learning, effective and functional representations have the potential to tremendously accelerate learning progress and solve more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-30 Dibya Ghosh , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine