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As the operations of autonomous systems generally affect simultaneously several users, it is crucial that their designs account for fairness considerations. In contrast to standard (deep) reinforcement learning (RL), we investigate the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-08-19 Umer Siddique , Paul Weng , Matthieu Zimmer

Non-stationary environments are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms. If the state transition and/or reward functions change based on latent factors, the agent is effectively tasked with optimizing a behavior that maximizes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Lucas N. Alegre , Ana L. C. Bazzan , Bruno C. da Silva

We study risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL), where we aim to maximize the Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) with a fixed risk tolerance $\tau$. Prior theoretical work studying risk-sensitive RL focuses on the tabular Markov Decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Yulai Zhao , Wenhao Zhan , Xiaoyan Hu , Ho-fung Leung , Farzan Farnia , Wen Sun , Jason D. Lee

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, such as Q-learning, directly parameterize and update value functions or policies without explicitly modeling the environment. They are typically simpler, more flexible to use, and thus more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Chi Jin , Zeyuan Allen-Zhu , Sebastien Bubeck , Michael I. Jordan

Reinforcement learning is about learning agent models that make the best sequential decisions in unknown environments. In an unknown environment, the agent needs to explore the environment while exploiting the collected information, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Hong Qian , Yang Yu

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) is a promising framework for tackling challenging domains requiring efficient exploration. Existing meta-RL algorithms are characterized by low sample efficiency, and mostly focus on low-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Zohar Rimon , Tom Jurgenson , Orr Krupnik , Gilad Adler , Aviv Tamar

A recent goal in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework is to choose a sequence of actions or a policy to maximize the reward collected or minimize the regret incurred in a finite time horizon. For several RL problems in operation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-08-18 K J Prabuchandran , Tejas Bodas , Theja Tulabandhula

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a general framework concerned with an agent that seeks to maximize rewards in an environment. The learning typically happens through trial and error using explorative methods, such as epsilon-greedy. There are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Per-Arne Andersen , Morten Goodwin , Ole-Christoffer Granmo

We study reinforcement learning under model misspecification, where we do not have access to the true environment but only to a reasonably close approximation to it. We address this problem by extending the framework of robust MDPs to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-10 Aurko Roy , Huan Xu , Sebastian Pokutta

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) is inherently a reactive method, operating under the assumption that it starts with no prior knowledge of the system and entirely depends on trial-and-error for learning. This approach faces several…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have led to recent successes in solving complex games, such as Atari or Starcraft, and to a huge impact in real-world applications, such as cybersecurity or autonomous driving. In the side of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Rubén Majadas , Javier García , Fernando Fernández

This paper initiates the study of scale-free learning in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), where the scale of rewards/losses is unknown to the learner. We design a generic algorithmic framework, \underline{S}cale \underline{C}lipping…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Mingyu Chen , Xuezhou Zhang

While most approaches to the problem of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) focus on estimating a reward function that best explains an expert agent's policy or demonstrated behavior on a control task, it is often the case that such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-01 Dexter R. R. Scobee , S. Shankar Sastry

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

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

We study a new model-free algorithm to compute $\varepsilon$-optimal policies for average reward Markov decision processes, in the weakly communicating case. Given a generative model, our procedure combines a recursive sampling technique…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-16 Jongmin Lee , Mario Bravo , Roberto Cominetti

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

Robust reinforcement learning (RRL) aims at seeking a robust policy to optimize the worst case performance over an uncertainty set of Markov decision processes (MDPs). This set contains some perturbed MDPs from a nominal MDP (N-MDP) that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Ukjo Hwang , Songnam Hong

Low sample efficiency is an enduring challenge of reinforcement learning (RL). With the advent of versatile large language models (LLMs), recent works impart common-sense knowledge to accelerate policy learning for RL processes. However, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Fuxiang Zhang , Junyou Li , Yi-Chen Li , Zongzhang Zhang , Yang Yu , Deheng Ye

How can a reinforcement learning (RL) agent prepare to solve downstream tasks if those tasks are not known a priori? One approach is unsupervised skill discovery, a class of algorithms that learn a set of policies without access to a reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Benjamin Eysenbach , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Sergey Levine