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Although parallelism has been extensively used in reinforcement learning (RL), the quantitative effects of parallel exploration are not well understood theoretically. We study the benefits of simple parallel exploration for reward-free RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Pedro Cisneros-Velarde , Boxiang Lyu , Sanmi Koyejo , Mladen Kolar

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training LLM-based agents, yet remains limited by low sample efficiency, stemming not only from sparse outcome feedback but also from the agent's inability to leverage prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Dilxat Muhtar , Jiashun Liu , Wei Gao , Weixun Wang , Shaopan Xiong , Ju Huang , Siran Yang , Wenbo Su , Jiamang Wang , Ling Pan , Bo Zheng

Despite the numerous breakthroughs achieved with Reinforcement Learning (RL), solving environments with sparse rewards remains a challenging task that requires sophisticated exploration. Learning from Demonstrations (LfD) remedies this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Georgiy Pshikhachev , Dmitry Ivanov , Vladimir Egorov , Aleksei Shpilman

Offline policy learning is aimed at learning decision-making policies using existing datasets of trajectories without collecting additional data. The primary motivation for using reinforcement learning (RL) instead of supervised learning…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has increasingly become a pivotal technique in the post-training of large language models (LLMs). The effective exploration of the output space is essential for the success of RL. We observe that for complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Shihan Dou , Muling Wu , Jingwen Xu , Rui Zheng , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Replicability is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), as RL algorithms are empirically observed to be unstable and sensitive to variations in training conditions. To formally address this issue, we study \emph{list…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Bohan Zhang , Michael Chen , A. Pavan , N. V. Vinodchandran , Lin F. Yang , Ruosong Wang

Most of the existing works for reinforcement learning (RL) with general function approximation (FA) focus on understanding the statistical complexity or regret bounds. However, the computation complexity of such approaches is far from being…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-19 Dingwen Kong , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Ruosong Wang , Lin F. Yang

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

Answering reasoning-based complex questions over text and hybrid sources, including tables, is a challenging task. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled in-context learning (ICL), allowing LLMs to acquire proficiency…

Despite the fact that deep reinforcement learning (RL) has surpassed human-level performances in various tasks, it still has several fundamental challenges. First, most RL methods require intensive data from the exploration of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Zhe Xu , Bo Wu , Aditya Ojha , Daniel Neider , Ufuk Topcu

Several practical applications of reinforcement learning involve an agent learning from past data without the possibility of further exploration. Often these applications require us to 1) identify a near optimal policy or to 2) estimate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Andrea Zanette

Value function approximation has demonstrated phenomenal empirical success in reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, despite a handful of recent progress on developing theory for RL with linear function approximation, the understanding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ruosong Wang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Lin F. Yang

Deep Research agents tackle knowledge-intensive tasks through multi-round retrieval and decision-oriented generation. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been shown to improve performance in this paradigm, its contributions remain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yinuo Xu , Shuo Lu , Jianjie Cheng , Meng Wang , Qianlong Xie , Xingxing Wang , Ran He , Jian Liang

Online matching problems arise in many complex systems, from cloud services and online marketplaces to organ exchange networks, where timely, principled decisions are critical for maintaining high system performance. Traditional heuristics…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-09 Chiara Mignacco , Matthieu Jonckheere , Gilles Stoltz

It is challenging for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to succeed in real-world applications like financial trading and logistic system due to the noisy observation and environment shifting between training and evaluation. Thus, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Zhengyu Yang , Kan Ren , Xufang Luo , Minghuan Liu , Weiqing Liu , Jiang Bian , Weinan Zhang , Dongsheng Li

A precondition for the deployment of a Reinforcement Learning agent to a real-world system is to provide guarantees on the learning process. While a learning algorithm will eventually converge to a good policy, there are no guarantees on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-27 Paul Daoudi , Mathias Formoso , Othman Gaizi , Achraf Azize , Evrard Garcelon

This paper investigates how to incorporate expert observations (without explicit information on expert actions) into a deep reinforcement learning setting to improve sample efficiency. First, we formulate an augmented policy loss combining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Erhan Can Ozcan , Vittorio Giammarino , James Queeney , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis

We consider the problem of imitation learning from a finite set of expert trajectories, without access to reinforcement signals. The classical approach of extracting the expert's reward function via inverse reinforcement learning, followed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Ruohan Wang , Carlo Ciliberto , Pierluigi Amadori , Yiannis Demiris

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RF-RL), a recently introduced RL paradigm, relies on random action-taking to explore the unknown environment without any reward feedback information. While the primary goal of the exploration phase in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-23 Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated tremendous empirical success across numerous challenging domains. However, we lack a strong theoretical understanding of the statistical complexity of RL in environments with large state spaces,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Gene Li