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Recently there has been much interest in understanding why deep neural networks are preferred to shallow networks. We show that, for a large class of piecewise smooth functions, the number of neurons needed by a shallow network to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-07 Shiyu Liang , R. Srikant

Navigating and understanding complex and unknown environments autonomously demands more than just basic perception and movement from embodied agents. Truly effective exploration requires agents to possess higher-level cognitive abilities,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Abdel Hakim Drid , Vincenzo Suriani , Daniele Nardi , Abderrezzak Debilou

Depth is widely viewed as a central contributor to the success of deep neural networks, whereas standard neural network approximation theory typically provides guarantees only for the final output and leaves the role of intermediate layers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Shijun Zhang , Zuowei Shen , Yuesheng Xu

Value functions are a central component of deep reinforcement learning (RL). These functions, parameterized by neural networks, are trained using a mean squared error regression objective to match bootstrapped target values. However,…

Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Max Simchowitz , Tiancheng Yu

Reinforcement Learning (RL), bolstered by the expressive capabilities of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for function approximation, has demonstrated considerable success in numerous applications. However, its practicality in addressing various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-26 Aditya Mohan , Amy Zhang , Marius Lindauer

Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has had incredible achievements on high dimensional problems, yet its learning process remains unstable even on the simplest tasks. Deep RL uses neural networks as function approximators. These neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Riccardo Della Vecchia , Alena Shilova , Philippe Preux , Riad Akrour

In recent years, deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been successful in various combinatorial search domains, such as two-player games and scientific discovery. However, directly applying deep RL in planning domains is still challenging.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Dieqiao Feng , Carla P. Gomes , Bart Selman

In this work, we study the simple yet universally applicable case of reward shaping in value-based Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). We show that reward shifting in the form of the linear transformation is equivalent to changing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Hao Sun , Lei Han , Rui Yang , Xiaoteng Ma , Jian Guo , Bolei Zhou

Deep reinforcement learning techniques have demonstrated superior performance in a wide variety of environments. As improvements in training algorithms continue at a brisk pace, theoretical or empirical studies on understanding what these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-16 Raghuram Mandyam Annasamy , Katia Sycara

Reduced bases have been introduced for the approximation of parametrized PDEs in applications where many online queries are required. Their numerical efficiency for such problems has been theoretically confirmed in \cite{BCDDPW,DPW}, where…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-02-20 Albert Cohen , Wolfgang Dahmen , Ronald DeVore

To achieve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL), it necessitates efficiently exploring the underlying environment. Under the offline setting, addressing the exploration challenge lies in collecting an offline dataset with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Shuang Qiu , Jieping Ye , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm in Artificial Intelligence (AI), enabling agents to learn optimal behaviors through interactions with their environments. Drawing from the foundations of trial and error, RL…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Majid Ghasemi , Amir Hossein Moosavi , Dariush Ebrahimi

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great empirical success in various application domains. The theoretical aspects of the problem have been extensively studied over past decades, particularly under tabular and linear Markov Decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Sattar Vakili

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training neural policies to solve complex control tasks. However, these policies tend to be overfit to the exact specifications of the task and environment they were…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-09-11 Felix Chalumeau , Raphael Boige , Bryan Lim , Valentin Macé , Maxime Allard , Arthur Flajolet , Antoine Cully , Thomas Pierrot

We consider the offline reinforcement learning problem, where the aim is to learn a decision making policy from logged data. Offline RL -- particularly when coupled with (value) function approximation to allow for generalization in large or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-31 Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy , David Simchi-Levi , Yunzong Xu

We devise a distributional variant of gradient temporal-difference (TD) learning. Distributional reinforcement learning has been demonstrated to outperform the regular one in the recent study \citep{bellemare2017distributional}. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-04 Chao Qu , Shie Mannor , Huan Xu

Decoding-based regression, which reformulates regression as a sequence generation task, has emerged as a promising paradigm of applying large language models for numerical prediction. However, its progress is hindered by the misalignment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Ming Chen , Sheng Tang , Rong-Xi Tan , Ziniu Li , Jiacheng Chen , Ke Xue , Chao Qian

This paper studies the problem of how efficiently functions in the Sobolev spaces $\mathcal{W}^{s,q}([0,1]^d)$ and Besov spaces $\mathcal{B}^s_{q,r}([0,1]^d)$ can be approximated by deep ReLU neural networks with width $W$ and depth $L$,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-21 Yunfei Yang

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to discover better actions through exploration. However, typical exploration techniques aim to maximize rewards, often incurring high costs in both exploration and learning processes. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Akane Tsuboya , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi