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We present a new model-based algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) which consists of explicit exploration and exploitation phases, and is applicable in large or infinite state spaces. The algorithm maintains a set of dynamics models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Mikael Henaff

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

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has gained great success by learning directly from high-dimensional sensory inputs, yet is notorious for the lack of interpretability. Interpretability of the subtasks is critical in hierarchical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-03-01 Daoming Lyu , Fangkai Yang , Bo Liu , Steven Gustafson

Reinforcement learning algorithms based on Q-learning are driving Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) research towards solving complex problems and achieving super-human performance on many of them. Nevertheless, Q-Learning is known to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Andrea Cini , Carlo D'Eramo , Jan Peters , Cesare Alippi

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is increasingly applied to large-scale decision-making problems like logistics, scheduling, and recommender systems, but existing algorithms struggle with the curse of dimensionality in such large discrete action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Heiko Hoppe , Fabian Akkerman , Wouter van Heeswijk , Maximilian Schiffer

While quantum reinforcement learning (RL) has attracted a surge of attention recently, its theoretical understanding is limited. In particular, it remains elusive how to design provably efficient quantum RL algorithms that can address the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-06-14 Han Zhong , Jiachen Hu , Yecheng Xue , Tongyang Li , Liwei Wang

Portfolio optimization is essential for balancing risk and return in financial decision-making. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has stood out as a cutting-edge tool for portfolio optimization that learns dynamic asset allocation using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Himanshu Choudhary , Arishi Orra , Manoj Thakur

We study constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) from a novel perspective by setting constraints directly on state density functions, rather than the value functions considered by previous works. State density has a clear physical and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Zengyi Qin , Yuxiao Chen , Chuchu Fan

To mitigate the limitation that the classical reinforcement learning (RL) framework heavily relies on identical training and test environments, Distributionally Robust RL (DRRL) has been proposed to enhance performance across a range of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-24 Zhipeng Liang , Xiaoteng Ma , Jose Blanchet , Jiheng Zhang , Zhengyuan Zhou

This paper is concerned with offline reinforcement learning (RL), which learns using pre-collected data without further exploration. Effective offline RL would be able to accommodate distribution shift and limited data coverage. However,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-11 Gen Li , Laixi Shi , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi , Yuting Wei

Mastering deep reinforcement learning (DRL) proves challenging in tasks featuring scant rewards. These limited rewards merely signify whether the task is partially or entirely accomplished, necessitating various exploration actions before…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang

Classical portfolio optimization often requires forecasting asset returns and their corresponding variances in spite of the low signal-to-noise ratio provided in the financial markets. Modern deep reinforcement learning (DRL) offers a…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2023-05-19 Alessio Brini , Daniele Tantari

In dynamic programming (DP) and reinforcement learning (RL), an agent learns to act optimally in terms of expected long-term return by sequentially interacting with its environment modeled by a Markov decision process (MDP). More generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Mastane Achab , Gergely Neu

Goal-conditioned hierarchical reinforcement learning (GCHRL) provides a promising approach to solving long-horizon tasks. Recently, its success has been extended to more general settings by concurrently learning hierarchical policies and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Siyuan Li , Jin Zhang , Jianhao Wang , Yang Yu , Chongjie Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the most practical ways to learn from real-life use-cases. Motivated from the cognitive methods used by humans makes it a widely acceptable strategy in the field of artificial intelligence. Most of the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Abhishek Sawaika , Samuel Yen-Chi Chen , Udaya Parampalli , Rajkumar Buyya

Deployment efficiency is an important criterion for many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL). Despite the community's increasing interest, there lacks a formal theoretical formulation for the problem. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-01 Jiawei Huang , Jinglin Chen , Li Zhao , Tao Qin , Nan Jiang , Tie-Yan Liu

We present a case study of model-free reinforcement learning (RL) framework to solve stochastic optimal control for a predefined parameter uncertainty distribution and partially observable system. We focus on robust optimal well control…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Atish Dixit , Ahmed H. ElSheikh

Seeking to improve model generalization, we consider a new approach based on distributionally robust learning (DRL) that applies stochastic gradient descent to the outer minimization problem. Our algorithm efficiently estimates the gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-24 Soumyadip Ghosh , Mark Squillante

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training is crucial for LLM alignment and reasoning, but existing policy-based methods, such as PPO and DPO, can fall short of fixing shortcuts inherited from pre-training. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Jin Peng Zhou , Kaiwen Wang , Jonathan Chang , Zhaolin Gao , Nathan Kallus , Kilian Q. Weinberger , Kianté Brantley , Wen Sun

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is a powerful paradigm for inferring a reward function from expert demonstrations. Many IRL algorithms require a known transition model and sometimes even a known expert policy, or they at least require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-23 David Lindner , Andreas Krause , Giorgia Ramponi