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While originally developed for continuous control problems, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has emerged as the work-horse of a variety of reinforcement learning (RL) applications, including the fine-tuning of generative models.…

Policy evaluation with linear function approximation is an important problem in reinforcement learning. When facing high-dimensional feature spaces, such a problem becomes extremely hard considering the computation efficiency and quality of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-28 Haifang Li , Yingce Xia , Wensheng Zhang

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) replaces hard-to-specify rewards with pairwise trajectory preferences, yet regret-oriented theory often assumes that preference labels are generated consistently from a single ground-truth…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Ming Shi , Yingbin Liang , Ness B. Shroff , Ananthram Swami

We consider a challenging theoretical problem in offline reinforcement learning (RL): obtaining sample-efficiency guarantees with a dataset lacking sufficient coverage, under only realizability-type assumptions for the function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Jinglin Chen , Nan Jiang

When function approximation is deployed in reinforcement learning (RL), the same problem may be formulated in different ways, often by treating a pre-processing step as a part of the environment or as part of the agent. As a consequence,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Nan Jiang

Value function learning plays a central role in many state-of-the-art reinforcement-learning algorithms. Many popular algorithms like Q-learning do not optimize any objective function, but are fixed-point iterations of some variant of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Yihao Feng , Lihong Li , Qiang Liu

A fundamental question in reinforcement learning theory is: suppose the optimal value functions are linear in given features, can we learn them efficiently? This problem's counterpart in supervised learning, linear regression, can be solved…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Daniel Kane , Sihan Liu , Shachar Lovett , Gaurav Mahajan , Csaba Szepesvári , Gellért Weisz

Recently, there has been remarkable progress in reinforcement learning (RL) with general function approximation. However, all these works only provide regret or sample complexity guarantees. It is still an open question if one can achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Yue Wu , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great empirical success in various application domains. The theoretical aspects of the problem have been extensively studied over past decades, particularly under tabular and linear Markov Decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Sattar Vakili

We propose and analyze a reinforcement learning principle that approximates the Bellman equations by enforcing their validity only along an user-defined space of test functions. Focusing on applications to model-free offline RL with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Andrea Zanette , Martin J. Wainwright

We consider the problem of preference based reinforcement learning (PbRL), where, unlike traditional reinforcement learning, an agent receives feedback only in terms of a 1 bit (0/1) preference over a trajectory pair instead of absolute…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Aldo Pacchiano , Aadirupa Saha , Jonathan Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

In this paper we argue for the fundamental importance of the value distribution: the distribution of the random return received by a reinforcement learning agent. This is in contrast to the common approach to reinforcement learning which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-24 Marc G. Bellemare , Will Dabney , Rémi Munos

Value-function approximation methods that operate in batch mode have foundational importance to reinforcement learning (RL). Finite sample guarantees for these methods often crucially rely on two types of assumptions: (1) mild distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-02 Jinglin Chen , Nan Jiang

In this work, we study model-based reinforcement learning (RL) in unknown stabilizable linear dynamical systems. When learning a dynamical system, one needs to stabilize the unknown dynamics in order to avoid system blow-ups. We propose an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-06 Sahin Lale , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Babak Hassibi , Anima Anandkumar

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-06 Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can learn complex policies to optimize agent operation over time. RL algorithms have shown promising results in solving complicated problems in recent years. However, their application on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-29 Hamed Khorasgani , Haiyan Wang , Chetan Gupta , Susumu Serita

In this paper we obtain several informative error bounds on function approximation for the policy evaluation algorithm proposed by Basu et al. when the aim is to find the risk-sensitive cost represented using exponential utility. The main…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Prasenjit Karmakar , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We consider the problem of provably optimal exploration in reinforcement learning for finite horizon MDPs. We show that an optimistic modification to value iteration achieves a regret bound of $\tilde{O}( \sqrt{HSAT} + H^2S^2A+H\sqrt{T})$…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-07-04 Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar , Ian Osband , Rémi Munos

Motivated by the prevailing paradigm of using unsupervised learning for efficient exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) problems [tang2017exploration,bellemare2016unifying], we investigate when this paradigm is provably efficient. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Fei Feng , Ruosong Wang , Wotao Yin , Simon S. Du , Lin F. Yang