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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

Value function approximation is important in modern reinforcement learning (RL) problems especially when the state space is (infinitely) large. Despite the importance and wide applicability of value function approximation, its theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-24 Hanlin Zhu , Ruosong Wang , Jason D. Lee

Reinforcement learning with outcome-based feedback faces a fundamental challenge: when rewards are only observed at trajectory endpoints, how do we assign credit to the right actions? This paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Fan Chen , Zeyu Jia , Alexander Rakhlin , Tengyang Xie

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems are fundamental in online decision-making and have been instrumental in finding an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs). Function approximations are usually deployed to handle large or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jiashuo Jiang , Yiming Zong , Yinyu Ye

In many real-world settings, reinforcement learning systems suffer performance degradation when the environment encountered at deployment differs from that observed during training. Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DR-RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Debamita Ghosh , George K. Atia , Yue Wang

In recent years deep neural networks have been successfully applied to the domains of reinforcement learning \cite{bengio2009learning,krizhevsky2012imagenet,hinton2006reducing}. Deep reinforcement learning \cite{mnih2015human} is reported…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Huihui Zhang , Wu Huang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs) using a pre-collected dataset. In this work, we revisit the linear programming (LP) reformulation of Markov decision processes for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Asuman Ozdaglar , Sarath Pattathil , Jiawei Zhang , Kaiqing Zhang

In recent years, the integration of Automated Planning (AP) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) has seen a surge of interest. To perform this integration, a general framework for Sequential Decision Making (SDM) would prove immensely useful, as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Carlos Núñez-Molina , Pablo Mesejo , Juan Fernández-Olivares

In reinforcement learning (RL), aligning agent behavior with specific objectives typically requires careful design of the reward function, which can be challenging when the desired objectives are complex. In this work, we propose an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Yuting Tang , Yivan Zhang , Johannes Ackermann , Yu-Jie Zhang , Soichiro Nishimori , Masashi Sugiyama

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework which is suitable for both the batch RL setting and the setting where there are many reward functions of interest. During the exploration phase, an agent collects samples without using…

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

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is appealing because (i) it enables planning and thus more strategic exploration, and (ii) by decoupling dynamics from rewards, it enables fast transfer to new reward functions. However, learning an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Evan Zheran Liu , Ramtin Keramati , Sudarshan Seshadri , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Emma Brunskill , Percy Liang

This paper studies systematic exploration for reinforcement learning with rich observations and function approximation. We introduce a new model called contextual decision processes, that unifies and generalizes most prior settings. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-12-02 Nan Jiang , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Alekh Agarwal , John Langford , Robert E. Schapire

One of the key approaches to save samples in reinforcement learning (RL) is to use knowledge from an approximate model such as its simulator. However, how much does an approximate model help to learn a near-optimal policy of the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 Fei Feng , Wotao Yin , Lin F. Yang

In this paper, a unified framework for exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) is proposed based on an option-critic model. The proposed framework learns to integrate a set of diverse exploration strategies so that the agent can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Woojun Kim , Jeonghye Kim , Youngchul Sung

Designing efficient learning algorithms with complexity guarantees for Markov decision processes (MDPs) with large or continuous state and action spaces remains a fundamental challenge. We address this challenge for entropy-regularized MDPs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Matthieu Meunier , Christoph Reisinger , Yufei Zhang

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and dense retrievers have driven significant progress in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). However, existing approaches face significant challenges in complex reasoning-oriented multi-hop…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yu Liu , Yanbing Liu , Fangfang Yuan , Cong Cao , Youbang Sun , Kun Peng , Weizhuo Chen , Jianjun Li , Zhiyuan Ma

Reinforcement Learning (RL) serves as a versatile framework for sequential decision-making, finding applications across diverse domains such as robotics, autonomous driving, recommendation systems, supply chain optimization, biology,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-26 Vaneet Aggarwal , Washim Uddin Mondal , Qinbo Bai

This paper considers batch Reinforcement Learning (RL) with general value function approximation. Our study investigates the minimal assumptions to reliably estimate/minimize Bellman error, and characterizes the generalization performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-26 Yaqi Duan , Chi Jin , Zhiyuan Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language model reasoning is frequently hindered by signal loss, a phenomenon where standard uniform sampling with small group sizes fails to uncover informative learning signals for difficult prompts.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Wei Xiong , Chenlu Ye , Baohao Liao , Hanze Dong , Xinxing Xu , Christof Monz , Jiang Bian , Nan Jiang , Tong Zhang

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved impressive successes yet often requires a very large amount of interaction data. This result is perhaps unsurprising, as using complicated function approximation often requires more data to fit, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Jonathan N. Lee , Aldo Pacchiano , Vidya Muthukumar , Weihao Kong , Emma Brunskill