English
Related papers

Related papers: Provable and Practical: Efficient Exploration in R…

200 papers

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is appealing because (i) it enables planning and thus more strategic exploration, and (ii) by decoupling dynamics from rewards, it enables fast transfer to new reward functions. However, learning an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Evan Zheran Liu , Ramtin Keramati , Sudarshan Seshadri , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Emma Brunskill , Percy Liang

Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Max Simchowitz , Tiancheng Yu

In this paper we introduce a simple approach for exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) that allows us to develop theoretically justified algorithms in the tabular case but that is also extendable to settings where function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-27 Marlos C. Machado , Marc G. Bellemare , Michael Bowling

Reinforcement learning (RL) has increasingly become a pivotal technique in the post-training of large language models (LLMs). The effective exploration of the output space is essential for the success of RL. We observe that for complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Shihan Dou , Muling Wu , Jingwen Xu , Rui Zheng , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework which is suitable for both the batch RL setting and the setting where there are many reward functions of interest. During the exploration phase, an agent collects samples without using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ruosong Wang , Simon S. Du , Lin F. Yang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Achieving efficient and scalable exploration in complex domains poses a major challenge in reinforcement learning. While Bayesian and PAC-MDP approaches to the exploration problem offer strong formal guarantees, they are often impractical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-11-23 Bradly C. Stadie , Sergey Levine , Pieter Abbeel

A common setting of reinforcement learning (RL) is a Markov decision process (MDP) in which the environment is a stochastic discrete-time dynamical system. Whereas MDPs are suitable in such applications as video-games or puzzles, physical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Pavel Osinenko , Dmitrii Dobriborsci , Grigory Yaremenko , Georgiy Malaniya

Learning complex distributions is a fundamental challenge in contemporary applications. Shen and Meinshausen (2024) introduced engression, a generative approach based on scoring rules that maps noise (and covariates, if available) directly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Xinwei Shen , Nicolai Meinshausen , Tong Zhang

We formulate gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling as optimization on the space of probability measures, with Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence as the objective functional. We show that an underdamped form of the Langevin…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-23 Yi-An Ma , Niladri Chatterji , Xiang Cheng , Nicolas Flammarion , Peter Bartlett , Michael I. Jordan

The problem of optimising functions with intractable gradients frequently arise in machine learning and statistics, ranging from maximum marginal likelihood estimation procedures to fine-tuning of generative models. Stochastic approximation…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-30 James Cuin , Davide Carbone , Yanbo Tang , O. Deniz Akyildiz

Distributionally Robust Reinforcement Learning (DR-RL) aims to derive a policy optimizing the worst-case performance within a predefined uncertainty set. Despite extensive research, previous DR-RL algorithms have predominantly favored…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Yudan Wang , Shaofeng Zou , Yue Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems are fundamental in online decision-making and have been instrumental in finding an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs). Function approximations are usually deployed to handle large or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jiashuo Jiang , Yiming Zong , Yinyu Ye

The curse of dimensionality is a widely known issue in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular setting where the state space $\mathcal{S}$ and the action space $\mathcal{A}$ are both finite, to obtain a nearly optimal policy with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Bingyan Wang , Yuling Yan , Jianqing Fan

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms have become powerful tools for Bayesian inference. However, they do not scale well to large-data problems. Divide-and-conquer strategies, which split the data into batches and, for each batch, run…

Computation · Statistics 2017-07-18 Christopher Nemeth , Chris Sherlock

The unprecedented growth in the field of machine learning has led to the development of deep neuromorphic networks trained on labelled dataset with capability to mimic or even exceed human capabilities. However, for applications involving…

Emerging Technologies · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Arjun Tyagi , Shubham Sahay

Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is one of the most powerful methods to sample from a given probability distribution, of which the Metropolis Adjusted Langevin Algorithm (MALA) is a variant wherein the gradient of the distribution is used…

Applications · Statistics 2022-01-21 Mariya Mamajiwala , Debasish Roy , Serge Guillas

We extend the Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) algorithm to compactly supported measures via a projection step, akin to projected Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). We show that (projected) LMC allows to sample in polynomial time from a…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-08-08 Sébastien Bubeck , Ronen Eldan , Joseph Lehec

In this work, we consider the popular tree-based search strategy within the framework of reinforcement learning, the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), in the context of infinite-horizon discounted cost Markov Decision Process (MDP). While…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-01-14 Devavrat Shah , Qiaomin Xie , Zhi Xu

Safe reinforcement learning has many variants and it is still an open research problem. Here, we focus on how to use action guidance by means of a non-expert demonstrator to avoid catastrophic events in a domain with sparse, delayed, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-12 Bilal Kartal , Pablo Hernandez-Leal , Chao Gao , Matthew E. Taylor

Linear temporal logic (LTL) is a powerful language for task specification in reinforcement learning, as it allows describing objectives beyond the expressivity of conventional discounted return formulations. Nonetheless, recent works have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Marco Bagatella , Andreas Krause , Georg Martius