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Modern reinforcement learning (RL) often faces an enormous state-action space. Existing analytical results are typically for settings with a small number of state-actions, or simple models such as linearly modeled Q-functions. To derive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-03 Sing-Yuan Yeh , Fu-Chieh Chang , Chang-Wei Yueh , Pei-Yuan Wu , Alberto Bernacchia , Sattar Vakili

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated superior performance in enhancing the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs). However, this accuracy-oriented learning paradigm often suffers from entropy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Hongye Cao , Zhixin Bai , Ziyue Peng , Boyan Wang , Tianpei Yang , Jing Huo , Yuyao Zhang , Yang Gao

Probabilistic learning to rank (LTR) has been the dominating approach for optimizing the ranking metric, but cannot maximize long-term rewards. Reinforcement learning models have been proposed to maximize user long-term rewards by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Teng Xiao , Suhang Wang

We present flow Q-learning (FQL), a simple and performant offline reinforcement learning (RL) method that leverages an expressive flow-matching policy to model arbitrarily complex action distributions in data. Training a flow policy with RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Seohong Park , Qiyang Li , Sergey Levine

A fundamental question in the theory of reinforcement learning is: suppose the optimal $Q$-function lies in the linear span of a given $d$ dimensional feature mapping, is sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) possible? The recent and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Yuanhao Wang , Ruosong Wang , Sham M. Kakade

Value-based reinforcement learning (RL) can in principle learn effective policies for a wide range of multi-turn problems, from games to dialogue to robotic control, including via offline RL from static previously collected datasets.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Joey Hong , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine

A critical factor in adopting machine learning for time-sensitive financial tasks is computational speed, including model training and inference. This paper demonstrates that a broad class of such problems, especially those previously…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-05-27 Liexin Cheng , Xue Cheng , Shuaiqiang Liu

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

We study reinforcement learning (RL) in high dimensional episodic Markov decision processes (MDP). We consider value-based RL when the optimal Q-value is a linear function of d-dimensional state-action feature representation. For instance,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Animashree Anandkumar

We propose a systematic method based on reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to find the optimal path that can minimize the total entropy production between two equilibrium states of open systems at the same temperature in a given fixed…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-06-07 Rongxing Xu

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have made huge progress in recent years by leveraging the power of deep neural networks (DNN). Despite the success, deep RL algorithms are known to be sample inefficient, often requiring many rounds of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-22 Zichuan Lin , Tianqi Zhao , Guangwen Yang , Lintao Zhang

This paper proposes \emph{Episodic and Lifelong Exploration via Maximum ENTropy} (ELEMENT), a novel, multiscale, intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning (RL) framework that is able to explore environments without using any extrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Hongming Li , Shujian Yu , Bin Liu , Jose C. Principe

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) for continuous control often requires large amounts of online interaction data. Value-based RL methods can mitigate this burden by offering relatively high sample efficiency. Some studies further enhance sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Jijia Liu , Feng Gao , Qingmin Liao , Chao Yu , Yu Wang

The $Q$-function is a central quantity in many Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for which RL agents behave following a (soft)-greedy policy w.r.t. to $Q$. It is a powerful tool that allows action selection without a model of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Nino Vieillard , Marcin Andrychowicz , Anton Raichuk , Olivier Pietquin , Matthieu Geist

Q-learning with neural network function approximation (neural Q-learning for short) is among the most prevalent deep reinforcement learning algorithms. Despite its empirical success, the non-asymptotic convergence rate of neural Q-learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-05 Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

We study reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes with continuous state spaces, where data are generated online from a single trajectory under a Markovian behavior policy. To avoid maintaining an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Shengbo Wang

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) methods in offline domains without additional online data collection, such as mobile health applications. Most of existing policy optimization algorithms in the computer science literature are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-28 Chengchun Shi , Shikai Luo , Yuan Le , Hongtu Zhu , Rui Song

In this paper, we propose a max-min entropy framework for reinforcement learning (RL) to overcome the limitation of the soft actor-critic (SAC) algorithm implementing the maximum entropy RL in model-free sample-based learning. Whereas the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Seungyul Han , Youngchul Sung

The current paper studies sample-efficient Reinforcement Learning (RL) in settings where only the optimal value function is assumed to be linearly-realizable. It has recently been understood that, even under this seemingly strong assumption…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Philip Amortila , Nan Jiang , Dhruv Madeka , Dean P. Foster