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The standard reinforcement learning (RL) formulation considers the expectation of the (discounted) cumulative reward. This is limiting in applications where we are concerned with not only the expected performance, but also the distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-13 Changjian Li , Krzysztof Czarnecki

The goal of the Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) task is to identify the underlying reward function and the corresponding optimal policy from a set of expert demonstrations. While most IRL algorithms' theoretical guarantees rely on a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-25 Ruijia Zhang , Siliang Zeng , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

Meta-learning algorithms use past experience to learn to quickly solve new tasks. In the context of reinforcement learning, meta-learning algorithms acquire reinforcement learning procedures to solve new problems more efficiently by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-01 Abhishek Gupta , Benjamin Eysenbach , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Compositional generalization refers to correctly interpret novel combinations of known primitives, which remains a major challenge. Existing approaches often rely on supervised fine-tuning, which encourages models to imitate target outputs.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xiyan Fu , Wei Liu

Linear temporal logic (LTL) and, more generally, $\omega$-regular objectives are alternatives to the traditional discount sum and average reward objectives in reinforcement learning (RL), offering the advantage of greater comprehensibility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Xuan-Bach Le , Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Alexander Rabinovich , Luke Ong

Both the optimal value function and the optimal policy can be used to model an optimal controller based on the duality established by the Bellman equation. Even with this duality, no parametric model has been able to output both policy and…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-06-02 Jicheng Shi , Yingzhao Lian , Colin N. Jones

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

Curriculum learning has been successfully used in reinforcement learning to accelerate the learning process, through knowledge transfer between tasks of increasing complexity. Critical tasks, in which suboptimal exploratory actions must be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-17 Francesco Foglino , Christiano Coletto Christakou , Ricardo Luna Gutierrez , Matteo Leonetti

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Tsung-Yen Yang , Justinian Rosca , Karthik Narasimhan , Peter J. Ramadge

Discounted reinforcement learning is fundamentally incompatible with function approximation for control in continuing tasks. It is not an optimization problem in its usual formulation, so when using function approximation there is no…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-28 Abhishek Naik , Roshan Shariff , Niko Yasui , Hengshuai Yao , Richard S. Sutton

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

Optimized control of quantum networks is essential for enabling distributed quantum applications with strict performance requirements. In near-term architectures with constrained hardware, effective control may determine the feasibility of…

The framework of reinforcement learning or optimal control provides a mathematical formalization of intelligent decision making that is powerful and broadly applicable. While the general form of the reinforcement learning problem enables…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-22 Sergey Levine

In the traditional view of reinforcement learning, the agent's goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes its expected sum of rewards. Once the agent finds this policy, the learning ends. This view contrasts with \emph{continual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Esraa Elelimy , David Szepesvari , Martha White , Michael Bowling

We devise a control-theoretic reinforcement learning approach to support direct learning of the optimal policy. We establish various theoretical properties of our approach, such as convergence and optimality of our analog of the Bellman…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Weiqin Chen , Mark S. Squillante , Chai Wah Wu , Santiago Paternain

In this paper we propose a framework towards achieving two intertwined objectives: (i) equipping reinforcement learning with active exploration and deliberate information gathering, such that it regulates state and parameter uncertainties…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Mohammad S. Ramadan , Mahmoud A. Hayajnh , Michael T. Tolley , Kyriakos G. Vamvoudakis

Designing an effective reward function has long been a challenge in reinforcement learning, particularly for complex tasks in unstructured environments. To address this, various learning paradigms have emerged that leverage different forms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Muhammad Qasim Elahi , Somtochukwu Oguchienti , Maheed H. Ahmed , Mahsa Ghasemi

Reinforcement learning tasks are typically specified as Markov decision processes. This formalism has been highly successful, though specifications often couple the dynamics of the environment and the learning objective. This lack of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Martha White

Most algorithms in reinforcement learning (RL) require that the objective is formalised with a Markovian reward function. However, it is well-known that certain tasks cannot be expressed by means of an objective in the Markov rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Rohan Subramani , Marcus Williams , Max Heitmann , Halfdan Holm , Charlie Griffin , Joar Skalse

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has gained substantial attention across diverse application domains and theoretical investigations. Existing literature on RL theory largely focuses on risk-neutral settings where the decision-maker learns to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Zhengqi Wu , Renyuan Xu