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Reward design remains a significant bottleneck in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. A popular alternative is reward learning, where reward functions are inferred from human feedback rather than manually specified.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Chaitanya Kharyal , Calarina Muslimani , Matthew E. Taylor

We extend the standard reinforcement learning framework to random time horizons. While the classical setting typically assumes finite and deterministic or infinite runtimes of trajectories, we argue that multiple real-world applications…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Enric Ribera Borrell , Lorenz Richter , Christof Schütte

We study the problem of infinite-horizon average-reward reinforcement learning with linear Markov decision processes (MDPs). The associated Bellman operator of the problem not being a contraction makes the algorithm design challenging.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-12 Kihyuk Hong , Woojin Chae , Yufan Zhang , Dabeen Lee , Ambuj Tewari

Reinforcement learning algorithms are defined by their learning update rules, which are typically hand-designed and fixed. We present an evolutionary framework for discovering reinforcement learning algorithms by searching directly over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Alkis Sygkounas , Amy Loutfi , Andreas Persson

Offline reinforcement learning seeks to utilize offline (observational) data to guide the learning of (causal) sequential decision making strategies. The hope is that offline reinforcement learning coupled with function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Ruosong Wang , Dean P. Foster , Sham M. Kakade

Learning high-performance control policies that remain consistent with expert behavior is a fundamental challenge in robotics. Reinforcement learning can discover high-performing strategies but often departs from desirable human behavior,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Siwei Ju , Jan Tauberschmidt , Oleg Arenz , Peter van Vliet , Jan Peters

Despite impressive results, reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from slow convergence and requires a large variety of tuning strategies. In this paper, we investigate the ability of RL algorithms on simple continuous control tasks. We show…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Daniel Layeghi , Steve Tonneau , Michael Mistry

We present a probabilistic logic programming framework to reinforcement learning, by integrating reinforce-ment learning, in POMDP environments, with normal hybrid probabilistic logic programs with probabilistic answer set seman-tics, that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2010-11-30 Emad Saad

Offline reinforcement learning, which seeks to utilize offline/historical data to optimize sequential decision-making strategies, has gained surging prominence in recent studies. Due to the advantage that appropriate function approximators…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-14 Ming Yin , Yaqi Duan , Mengdi Wang , Yu-Xiang Wang

We study the problem of high-dimensional robust linear regression where a learner is given access to $n$ samples from the generative model $Y = \langle X,w^* \rangle + \epsilon$ (with $X \in \mathbb{R}^d$ and $\epsilon$ independent), in…

Optimization problems pervade essentially every scientific discipline and industry. Many such problems require finding a solution that maximizes the number of constraints satisfied. Often, these problems are particularly difficult to solve…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-26 Fabio L. Traversa , Pietro Cicotti , Forrest Sheldon , Massimiliano Di Ventra

In reinforcement learning, an agent interacts sequentially with an environment to maximize a reward, receiving only partial, probabilistic feedback. This creates a fundamental exploration-exploitation trade-off: the agent must explore to…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-27 Josep Lumbreras , Ruo Cheng Huang , Yanglin Hu , Marco Fanizza , Mile Gu

Modern deep learning methods provide effective means to learn good representations. However, is a good representation itself sufficient for sample efficient reinforcement learning? This question has largely been studied only with respect to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Simon S. Du , Sham M. Kakade , Ruosong Wang , Lin F. Yang

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance via extended chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet suffer from excessive token consumption and high inference latency. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches for CoT…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Tingcheng Bian , Yuzhe Zhang , Jing Jin , Jinchang Luo , MingQuan Cheng , Haiwei Wang , Wenyuan Jiang , Miaohui Wang

In performative Reinforcement Learning (RL), an agent faces a policy-dependent environment: the reward and transition functions depend on the agent's policy. Prior work on performative RL has studied the convergence of repeated retraining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Vasilis Pollatos , Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic

Constrained optimization problems appear in a wide variety of challenging real-world problems, where constraints often capture the physics of the underlying system. Classic methods for solving these problems rely on iterative algorithms…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-13 Meiyi Li , Soheil Kolouri , Javad Mohammadi

The theory of reinforcement learning has focused on two fundamental problems: achieving low regret, and identifying $\epsilon$-optimal policies. While a simple reduction allows one to apply a low-regret algorithm to obtain an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Andrew Wagenmaker , Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson

We propose a new methodology for parameterized constrained robust optimization, an important class of optimization problems under uncertainty, based on learning with a self-supervised penalty-based loss function. Whereas supervised learning…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-10 Wyame Benslimane , Paul Grigas

We present a new algorithm based on posterior sampling for learning in constrained Markov decision processes (CMDP) in the infinite-horizon undiscounted setting. The algorithm achieves near-optimal regret bounds while being advantageous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Danil Provodin , Pratik Gajane , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Maurits Kaptein

This paper studies reward-agnostic exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) -- a scenario where the learner is unware of the reward functions during the exploration stage -- and designs an algorithm that improves over the state of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Gen Li , Yuling Yan , Yuxin Chen , Jianqing Fan