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Off-policy actor-critic algorithms have shown strong potential in deep reinforcement learning for continuous control tasks. Their success primarily comes from leveraging pessimistic state-action value function updates, which reduce function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Bahareh Tasdighi , Nicklas Werge , Yi-Shan Wu , Melih Kandemir

The ability to discover approximately optimal policies in domains with sparse rewards is crucial to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in many real-world scenarios. Approaches such as neural density models and continuous exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-25 Bogdan Mazoure , Thang Doan , Audrey Durand , R Devon Hjelm , Joelle Pineau

Optimization of parameterized policies for reinforcement learning (RL) is an important and challenging problem in artificial intelligence. Among the most common approaches are algorithms based on gradient ascent of a score function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Sriram Srinivasan , Marc Lanctot , Vinicius Zambaldi , Julien Perolat , Karl Tuyls , Remi Munos , Michael Bowling

We study the problem of reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon discounted linear Markov decision processes (MDPs), and propose the first computationally efficient algorithm achieving rate-optimal regret guarantees in this setting. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Antoine Moulin , Gergely Neu , Luca Viano

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been demonstrated on a range of challenging decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from two major challenges: very high sample complexity and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-10 Tuomas Haarnoja , Aurick Zhou , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

While deep reinforcement learning has achieved tremendous successes in various applications, most existing works only focus on maximizing the expected value of total return and thus ignore its inherent stochasticity. Such stochasticity is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Han Zhong , Xun Deng , Ethan X. Fang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Runze Li

Distributional reinforcement learning algorithms have attempted to utilize estimated uncertainty for exploration, such as optimism in the face of uncertainty. However, using the estimated variance for optimistic exploration may cause biased…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Taehyun Cho , Seungyub Han , Heesoo Lee , Kyungjae Lee , Jungwoo Lee

Risk sensitivity has become a central theme in reinforcement learning (RL), where convex risk measures and robust formulations provide principled ways to model preferences beyond expected return. Recent extensions to multi-agent RL (MARL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Runyu Zhang , Na Li , Asuman Ozdaglar , Jeff Shamma , Gioele Zardini

In order to compute near-optimal policies with policy-gradient algorithms, it is common in practice to include intrinsic exploration terms in the learning objective. Although the effectiveness of these terms is usually justified by an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

We study the challenging exploration incentive problem in both bandit and reinforcement learning, where the rewards are scale-free and potentially unbounded, driven by real-world scenarios and differing from existing work. Past works in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Mengfan Xu , Diego Klabjan

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), in particular, have the potential to disrupt and are already changing the way we interact with the world. One of the key indicators of their applicability is their ability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Nikolai Rozanov

The multi-agent setting is intricate and unpredictable since the behaviors of multiple agents influence one another. To address this environmental uncertainty, distributional reinforcement learning algorithms that incorporate uncertainty…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Jihwan Oh , Joonkee Kim , Minchan Jeong , Se-Young Yun

Risk-aware Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms like SAC and TD3 were shown empirically to outperform their risk-neutral counterparts in a variety of continuous-action tasks. However, the theoretical basis for the pessimistic objectives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan

Offline learning of strategies takes data efficiency to its extreme by restricting algorithms to a fixed dataset of state-action trajectories. We consider the problem in a mixed-motive multiagent setting, where the goal is to solve a game…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Austin A. Nguyen , Michael P. Wellman

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) studies how to leverage environment statistics to learn useful behaviors without the cost of reward engineering. However, a central challenge in unsupervised RL is to extract behaviors that…

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) agents typically learn world models by minimizing predictive loss. However, powerful RL optimizers inevitably exploit minor model inaccuracies, leading to simulator exploitation and a reality gap…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Christoph Dann , Yishay Mansour , Mehryar Mohri

Safe reinforcement learning is extremely challenging--not only must the agent explore an unknown environment, it must do so while ensuring no safety constraint violations. We formulate this safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem using the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Archana Bura , Aria HasanzadeZonuzy , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai , Jean-Francois Chamberland

We study algorithms for average-cost reinforcement learning problems with value function approximation. Our starting point is the recently proposed POLITEX algorithm, a version of policy iteration where the policy produced in each iteration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-29 Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Nevena Lazic , Csaba Szepesvari , Gellert Weisz

We propose a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm inspired by the popular randomized least squares value iteration (RLSVI) algorithm as well as the optimism principle. Unlike existing upper-confidence-bound (UCB) based approaches,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Haque Ishfaq , Qiwen Cui , Viet Nguyen , Alex Ayoub , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Doina Precup , Lin F. Yang