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Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Philippe Morere , Gilad Francis , Tom Blau , Fabio Ramos

Deep reinforcement learning includes a broad family of algorithms that parameterise an internal representation, such as a value function or policy, by a deep neural network. Each algorithm optimises its parameters with respect to an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-17 Zhongwen Xu , Hado van Hasselt , Matteo Hessel , Junhyuk Oh , Satinder Singh , David Silver

We study the exploration problem with approximate linear action-value functions in episodic reinforcement learning under the notion of low inherent Bellman error, a condition normally employed to show convergence of approximate value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Andrea Zanette , Alessandro Lazaric , Mykel Kochenderfer , Emma Brunskill

Greedy-GQ with linear function approximation, originally proposed in \cite{maei2010toward}, is a value-based off-policy algorithm for optimal control in reinforcement learning, and it has a non-linear two timescale structure with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Yue Wang , Yi Zhou , Shaofeng Zou

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a goal-oriented learning solution that has proven to be successful for Neural Architecture Search (NAS) on the CIFAR and ImageNet datasets. However, a limitation of this approach is its high computational…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-12-04 J. Gomez Robles , J. Vanschoren

The recent breakthroughs of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) technique in Alpha Go and playing Atari have set a good example in handling large state and actions spaces of complicated control problems. The DRL technique is comprised of (i)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-12 Hongjia Li , Tianshu Wei , Ao Ren , Qi Zhu , Yanzhi Wang

We consider the problem of approximating a given element $f$ from a Hilbert space $\mathcal{H}$ by means of greedy algorithms and the application of such procedures to the regression problem in statistical learning theory. We improve on the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2009-09-29 Andrew R. Barron , Albert Cohen , Wolfgang Dahmen , Ronald A. DeVore

Massive practical works addressed by Deep Q-network (DQN) algorithm have indicated that stochastic policy, despite its simplicity, is the most frequently used exploration approach. However, most existing stochastic exploration approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Wenhui Huang , Cong Zhang , Jingda Wu , Xiangkun He , Jie Zhang , Chen Lv

This paper makes one step forward towards characterizing a new family of \textit{model-free} Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms. The aim of these algorithms is to jointly learn an approximation of the state-value function ($V$),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-15 Matthia Sabatelli , Gilles Louppe , Pierre Geurts , Marco A. Wiering

Reward maximization, safe exploration, and intrinsic motivation are often studied as separate objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). We present a unified geometric framework, that views these goals as instances of a single optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Nikola Milosevic , Nico Scherf

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

Recently, reinforcement learning~(RL) has become an important approach for improving the capabilities of large language models~(LLMs). In particular, reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards~(RLVR) has emerged as a promising paradigm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Fei Bai , Zhipeng Chen , Chuan Hao , Ming Yang , Ran Tao , Bryan Dai , Wayne Xin Zhao , Jian Yang , Hongteng Xu

In complex environments with large discrete action spaces, effective decision-making is critical in reinforcement learning (RL). Despite the widespread use of value-based RL approaches like Q-learning, they come with a computational burden,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Fares Fourati , Vaneet Aggarwal , Mohamed-Slim Alouini

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

Despite empirical success, the theory of reinforcement learning (RL) with value function approximation remains fundamentally incomplete. Prior work has identified a variety of pathological behaviours that arise in RL algorithms that combine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-30 Kenny Young , Richard S. Sutton

Gradient descent or its variants are popular in training neural networks. However, in deep Q-learning with neural network approximation, a type of reinforcement learning, gradient descent (also known as Residual Gradient (RG)) is barely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Shuyu Yin , Tao Luo , Peilin Liu , Zhi-Qin John Xu

Based on the tree architecture, the objective of this paper is to design deep neural networks with two or more hidden layers (called deep nets) for realization of radial functions so as to enable rotational invariance for near-optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-04 Charles K. Chui , Shao-Bo Lin , Ding-Xuan Zhou

While quantum reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted a surge of attention recently, its theoretical understanding is limited. In particular, it remains elusive how to design provably efficient quantum RL algorithms that can address the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-06-14 Han Zhong , Jiachen Hu , Yecheng Xue , Tongyang Li , Liwei Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has a rich history in neuroscience, from early work on dopamine as a reward prediction error signal (Schultz et al., 1997) to recent work proposing that the brain could implement a form of 'distributional…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2024-12-19 Kristopher T. Jensen