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Mastering deep reinforcement learning (DRL) proves challenging in tasks featuring scant rewards. These limited rewards merely signify whether the task is partially or entirely accomplished, necessitating various exploration actions before…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang

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

Modern Reinforcement Learning (RL) is commonly applied to practical problems with an enormous number of states, where function approximation must be deployed to approximate either the value function or the policy. The introduction of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-09 Chi Jin , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Michael I. Jordan

Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems are being considered under increasingly more complex structures. While tabular and linear models have been thoroughly explored, the analytical study of RL under nonlinear function approximation,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Aya Kayal , Sattar Vakili , Laura Toni , Alberto Bernacchia

This paper is concerned with offline reinforcement learning (RL), which learns using pre-collected data without further exploration. Effective offline RL would be able to accommodate distribution shift and limited data coverage. However,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-11 Gen Li , Laixi Shi , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi , Yuting Wei

Recent studies have shown that episodic reinforcement learning (RL) is no harder than bandits when the total reward is bounded by $1$, and proved regret bounds that have a polylogarithmic dependence on the planning horizon $H$. However, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Kaixuan Ji , Qingyue Zhao , Jiafan He , Weitong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

We develop several provably efficient model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We consider both online setting and the setting with access to a simulator. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Zihan Zhang , Qiaomin Xie

We study human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (RL) with trajectory preferences, where instead of receiving a numeric reward at each step, the agent only receives preferences over trajectory pairs from a human overseer. The goal of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Xiaoyu Chen , Han Zhong , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Liwei Wang

Learning Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the presence of the adversary is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we study RL in episodic MDPs with adversarial reward and full information feedback, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-21 Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

Although model-based reinforcement learning (RL) approaches are considered more sample efficient, existing algorithms are usually relying on sophisticated planning algorithm to couple tightly with the model-learning procedure. Hence the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Xiaoyu Chen , Jiachen Hu , Lin F. Yang , Liwei Wang

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn a near-optimal policy from a fixed dataset of transitions collected by another policy. This problem has attracted a lot of attention recently, but most existing methods with strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Germano Gabbianelli , Gergely Neu , Nneka Okolo , Matteo Papini

Resource allocation plays a critical role in minimizing cycle time and improving the efficiency of business processes. Recently, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as a powerful technique to optimize resource allocation policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Jeroen Middelhuis , Zaharah Bukhsh , Ivo Adan , Remco Dijkman

The optimal objective is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how policies are evaluated and optimized. While total return maximization is the ideal objective in RL, discounted return maximization is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Shuyu Yin , Fei Wen , Peilin Liu , Tao Luo

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

This paper addresses the problem of learning optimal control policies for systems with uncertain dynamics and high-level control objectives specified as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas. Uncertainty is considered in the workspace…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Yiannis Kantaros , Jun Wang

There have been many recent advances on provably efficient Reinforcement Learning (RL) in problems with rich observation spaces. However, all these works share a strong realizability assumption about the optimal value function of the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Christoph Dann , Yishay Mansour , Mehryar Mohri , Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan

We consider the reinforcement learning (RL) problem with general utilities which consists in maximizing a function of the state-action occupancy measure. Beyond the standard cumulative reward RL setting, this problem includes as particular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Anas Barakat , Ilyas Fatkhullin , Niao He

We revisit offline reinforcement learning on episodic time-homogeneous Markov Decision Processes (MDP). For tabular MDP with $S$ states and $A$ actions, or linear MDP with anchor points and feature dimension $d$, given the collected $K$…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-11 Tongzheng Ren , Jialian Li , Bo Dai , Simon S. Du , Sujay Sanghavi

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan