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Reinforcement learning (RL) has revolutionized decision-making across a wide range of domains over the past few decades. Yet, deploying RL policies in real-world scenarios presents the crucial challenge of ensuring safety. Traditional safe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-03-26 Lunet Yifru , Ali Baheri

Reinforcement learning (RL) combines a control problem with statistical estimation: The system dynamics are not known to the agent, but can be learned through experience. A recent line of research casts `RL as inference' and suggests a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-05 Brendan O'Donoghue , Ian Osband , Catalin Ionescu

This paper proposes a suite of rationality measures and associated theory for reinforcement learning agents, a property increasingly critical yet rarely explored. We define an action in deployment to be perfectly rational if it maximises…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Kejiang Qian , Amos Storkey , Fengxiang He

Many of the challenges facing today's reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, such as robustness, generalization, transfer, and computational efficiency are closely related to compression. Prior work has convincingly argued why minimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-08 Benjamin Eysenbach , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Sergey Levine

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

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to infer a reward from expert demonstrations, motivated by the idea that the reward, rather than the policy, is the most succinct and transferable description of a task [Ng et al., 2000]. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Maryam Kamgarpour

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) enhances the understanding of the effects of the randomness in the environment by letting agents learn the distribution of a random return, rather than its expected value as in standard…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-26 Zifan Wang , Yulong Gao , Siyi Wang , Michael M. Zavlanos , Alessandro Abate , Karl H. Johansson

Performance evaluations are critical for quantifying algorithmic advances in reinforcement learning. Recent reproducibility analyses have shown that reported performance results are often inconsistent and difficult to replicate. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-14 Scott M. Jordan , Yash Chandak , Daniel Cohen , Mengxue Zhang , Philip S. Thomas

Understanding generalization in reinforcement learning (RL) is a significant challenge, as many common assumptions of traditional supervised learning theory do not apply. We focus on the special class of reparameterizable RL problems, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Huan Wang , Stephan Zheng , Caiming Xiong , Richard Socher

Reinforcement learning is structurally harder than supervised learning because the policy changes the data distribution it learns from. The resulting fragility is especially visible in large-model training, where the training and rollout…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Rasool Fakoor , Murdock Aubry , Nicholas Stranges , Alexander J. Smola

Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Alexander W. Goodall , Edwin Hamel-De le Court , Francesco Belardinelli

Many sequential decision-making problems that are currently automated, such as those in manufacturing or recommender systems, operate in an environment where there is either little uncertainty, or zero risk of catastrophe. As companies and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Marc Rigter

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for decision processes with non-Markovian reward, in which high-level knowledge of the task in the form of reward machines is available to the learner. We consider probabilistic reward machines with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Hippolyte Bourel , Anders Jonsson , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Chenxiao Ma , Mohammad Sadegh Talebi

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) enhances the understanding of the effects of the randomness in the environment by letting agents learn the distribution of a random return, rather than its expected value as in standard RL. At the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-27 Zifan Wang , Yulong Gao , Siyi Wang , Michael M. Zavlanos , Alessandro Abate , Karl H. Johansson

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

In sequential decision-making problems, Return-Conditioned Supervised Learning (RCSL) has gained increasing recognition for its simplicity and stability in modern decision-making tasks. Unlike traditional offline reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Zhishuai Liu , Yu Yang , Ruhan Wang , Pan Xu , Dongruo Zhou

Reinforcement learning (RL) enables sequential decision-making in complex and high-dimensional environments through interaction with the environment. In most real-world applications, however, a high number of interactions are infeasible. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Md Ferdous Alam , Parinaz Naghizadeh , David Hoelzle

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

Reliant on too many experiments to learn good actions, current Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have limited applicability in real-world settings, which can be too expensive to allow exploration. We propose an algorithm for batch RL,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Rasool Fakoor , Jonas Mueller , Kavosh Asadi , Pratik Chaudhari , Alexander J. Smola

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao