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Learning a predictive model of the mean return, or value function, plays a critical role in many reinforcement learning algorithms. Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has been shown to improve performance by modeling the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Ju-Seung Byun , Andrew Perrault

In reinforcement learning, distributional off-policy evaluation (OPE) focuses on estimating the return distribution of a target policy using offline data collected under a different policy. This work focuses on extending the widely used…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-21 Sungee Hong , Jiayi Wang , Zhengling Qi , Raymond K. W. Wong

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods for large-scale reinforcement learning, and their empirical success has prompted several works that develop the foundation of their global convergence theory. However, prior works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Junzi Zhang , Jongho Kim , Brendan O'Donoghue , Stephen Boyd

This paper studies the performative policy learning problem, where agents adjust their features in response to a released policy to improve their potential outcomes, inducing an endogenous distribution shift. There has been growing interest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Qianyi Chen , Ying Chen , Bo Li

Distributional Reinforcement Learning (RL) maintains the entire probability distribution of the reward-to-go, i.e. the return, providing more learning signals that account for the uncertainty associated with policy performance, which may be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-24 Luchen Li , A. Aldo Faisal

We propose an (offline) multi-dimensional distributional reinforcement learning framework (KE-DRL) that leverages Hilbert space mappings to estimate the kernel mean embedding of the multi-dimensional value distribution under a proposed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Mehrdad Mohammadi , Qi Zheng , Ruoqing Zhu

Reliable uncertainty quantification is crucial for reinforcement learning (RL) in high-stakes settings. We propose a unified conformal prediction framework for infinite-horizon policy evaluation that constructs distribution-free prediction…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-31 Feichen Gan , Youcun Lu , Yingying Zhang , Yukun Liu

Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-10 Ruiyi Zhang , Changyou Chen , Chunyuan Li , Lawrence Carin

Policy search methods are crucial in reinforcement learning, offering a framework to address continuous state-action and partially observable problems. However, the complexity of exploring vast policy spaces can lead to significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-18 Majid Molaei , Marcello Restelli , Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini

Continuous-time reinforcement learning (CTRL) provides a principled framework for sequential decision-making in environments where interactions evolve continuously over time. Despite its empirical success, the theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Runze Zhao , Yue Yu , Adams Yiyue Zhu , Chen Yang , Dongruo Zhou

We propose a method for learning expressive energy-based policies for continuous states and actions, which has been feasible only in tabular domains before. We apply our method to learning maximum entropy policies, resulting into a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-25 Tuomas Haarnoja , Haoran Tang , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Meta-reinforcement learning trains a single reinforcement learning agent on a distribution of tasks to quickly generalize to new tasks outside of the training set at test time. From a Bayesian perspective, one can interpret this as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Joery A. de Vries , Jinke He , Mathijs M. de Weerdt , Matthijs T. J. Spaan

This article introduces an imitation learning method for learning maximum entropy policies that comply with constraints demonstrated by expert trajectories executing a task. The formulation of the method takes advantage of results…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 George Papadopoulos , George A. Vouros

We describe a new approach for managing aleatoric uncertainty in the Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigm. Instead of selecting actions according to a single statistic, we propose a distributional method based on the second-order stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 John D. Martin , Michal Lyskawinski , Xiaohu Li , Brendan Englot

Classical reinforcement learning (RL) techniques are generally concerned with the design of decision-making policies driven by the maximisation of the expected outcome. Nevertheless, this approach does not take into consideration the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-02 Thibaut Théate , Damien Ernst

We consider the problem of estimating the joint distribution of $n$ independent random variables. Our approach is based on a family of candidate probabilities that we shall call a model and which is chosen to either contain the true…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-06-01 Yannick Baraud

We consider statistical methods which invoke a min-max distributionally robust formulation to extract good out-of-sample performance in data-driven optimization and learning problems. Acknowledging the distributional uncertainty in learning…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-08-05 Jose Blanchet , Karthyek Murthy , Viet Anh Nguyen

Motivated by the many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) that require safe-policy iterations, we consider the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) -- the problem of evaluating a new policy using the historical data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Tengyang Xie , Yifei Ma , Yu-Xiang Wang

This paper describes a new information-theoretic policy evaluation technique for reinforcement learning. This technique converts any compression or density model into a corresponding estimate of value. Under appropriate stationarity and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-11-20 Joel Veness , Marc G. Bellemare , Marcus Hutter , Alvin Chua , Guillaume Desjardins

We show that several machine learning estimators, including square-root LASSO (Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection) and regularized logistic regression can be represented as solutions to distributionally robust optimization (DRO)…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-10-22 Jose Blanchet , Yang Kang , Karthyek Murthy