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Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from the curse of dimensionality when the state-action space is large. A common practice is to parameterize the high-dimensional value and policy functions using given features. However…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-14 Lin F. Yang , Mengdi Wang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has significantly advanced the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, it struggles to break through the inherent capability boundaries of the base LLM, due…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Yihong Dong , Xue Jiang , Yongding Tao , Huanyu Liu , Kechi Zhang , Lili Mou , Rongyu Cao , Yingwei Ma , Jue Chen , Binhua Li , Zhi Jin , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li , Ge Li

The inverse reinforcement learning approach to imitation learning is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can enable learning from a smaller number of expert demonstrations with more robustness to error compounding than behavioral…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Juntao Ren , Gokul Swamy , Zhiwei Steven Wu , J. Andrew Bagnell , Sanjiban Choudhury

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) optimizes policies for reward but imposes few constraints on how decisions evolve over time. As a result, policies may achieve high performance while exhibiting temporally incoherent behavior such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Sukesh Subaharan

Despite recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL), its application in safety critical domains like autonomous vehicles is still challenging. Although punishing RL agents for risky situations can help to learn safe policies, it may also…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Danial Kamran , Tizian Engelgeh , Marvin Busch , Johannes Fischer , Christoph Stiller

Reinforcement Learning algorithms that learn from human feedback (RLHF) need to be efficient in terms of statistical complexity, computational complexity, and query complexity. In this work, we consider the RLHF setting where the feedback…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Runzhe Wu , Wen Sun

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated tremendous empirical success across numerous challenging domains. However, we lack a strong theoretical understanding of the statistical complexity of RL in environments with large state spaces,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Gene Li

Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) aims to maximize the expected total reward, while the risk of uncertain outcomes needs to be controlled to ensure reliable performance in a risk-averse setting. In this paper, we consider the problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Xian Yu , Siqian Shen

Reinforcement learning (RL) is empirically successful in complex nonlinear Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous state spaces. By contrast, the majority of theoretical RL literature requires the MDP to satisfy some form of linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Dhruv Malik , Aldo Pacchiano , Vishwak Srinivasan , Yuanzhi Li

This paper studies model-based reinforcement learning (RL) for regret minimization. We focus on finite-horizon episodic RL where the transition model $P$ belongs to a known family of models $\mathcal{P}$, a special case of which is when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Alex Ayoub , Zeyu Jia , Csaba Szepesvari , Mengdi Wang , Lin F. Yang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved tremendous success in recent years. However, the classical foundations of RL do not account for the risk sensitivity of the objective function, which is critical in various fields, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Mohammad Alipour-Vaezi , Huaiyang Zhong , Kwok-Leung Tsui , Sajad Khodadadian

In recent years, significant progress has been made in solving challenging problems across various domains using deep reinforcement learning (RL). Reproducing existing work and accurately judging the improvements offered by novel methods is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-31 Peter Henderson , Riashat Islam , Philip Bachman , Joelle Pineau , Doina Precup , David Meger

Many policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can be viewed as instantiations of approximate policy iteration (PI), i.e., where policy improvement and policy evaluation are both performed approximately. In applications where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Yashaswini Murthy , Mehrdad Moharrami , R. Srikant

In this paper, we study the problem of efficient online reinforcement learning in the infinite horizon setting when there is an offline dataset to start with. We assume that the offline dataset is generated by an expert but with unknown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Dengwang Tang , Rahul Jain , Botao Hao , Zheng Wen

Performative prediction is a framework accounting for the shift in the data distribution induced by the prediction of a model deployed in the real world. Ensuring rapid convergence to a stable solution where the data distribution remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Pedram Khorsandi , Rushil Gupta , Mehrnaz Mofakhami , Simon Lacoste-Julien , Gauthier Gidel

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Kianté Brantley , Hal Daumé , Miroslav Dudik , Robert Schapire

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) -- the problem of learning reward functions from demonstrations of an \emph{expert policy} -- plays a critical role in developing intelligent systems. While widely used in applications, theoretical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-13 Lei Zhao , Mengdi Wang , Yu Bai

Among the reasons hindering reinforcement learning (RL) applications to real-world problems, two factors are critical: limited data and the mismatch between the testing environment (real environment in which the policy is deployed) and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Xiaoteng Ma , Zhipeng Liang , Jose Blanchet , Mingwen Liu , Li Xia , Jiheng Zhang , Qianchuan Zhao , Zhengyuan Zhou

The evaluation of the impact of using Machine Learning in the management of softwarized networks is considered in multiple research works. Beyond that, we propose to evaluate the robustness of online learning for optimal network slice…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2021-08-21 Jose Jurandir Alves Esteves , Amina Boubendir , Fabrice Guillemin , Pierre Sens

In reward-free reinforcement learning (RL), an agent explores the environment first without any reward information, in order to achieve certain learning goals afterwards for any given reward. In this paper we focus on reward-free RL under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Yuan Cheng , Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang