English
Related papers

Related papers: The Effective Horizon Explains Deep RL Performance…

200 papers

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been widely studied in the portfolio management task. However, it is challenging to understand a DRL-based trading strategy because of the black-box nature of deep neural networks. In this paper, we…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2021-12-21 Mao Guan , Xiao-Yang Liu

We provide a framework for accelerating reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms by heuristics constructed from domain knowledge or offline data. Tabula rasa RL algorithms require environment interactions or computation that scales with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Ching-An Cheng , Andrey Kolobov , Adith Swaminathan

Low-complexity models such as linear function representation play a pivotal role in enabling sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL). The current paper pertains to a scenario with value-based linear representation, which postulates the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Gen Li , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi , Yuantao Gu , Yuting Wei

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

We study finite-horizon offline reinforcement learning (RL) with function approximation for both policy evaluation and policy optimization. Prior work established that statistically efficient learning is impossible for either of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Volodymyr Tkachuk , Csaba Szepesvári , Xiaoqi Tan

In recent years, deep discrete representation learning (DRL) has achieved significant success across various domains. Most DRL frameworks (e.g., the widely used VQ-VAE and its variants) have primarily focused on generative settings, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Tung-Long Vuong

We introduce a novel class of algorithms to efficiently approximate the unknown return distributions in policy evaluation problems from distributional reinforcement learning (DRL). The proposed distributional dynamic programming algorithms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-22 Julian Gerstenberg , Ralph Neininger , Denis Spiegel

Double Reinforcement Learning (DRL) enables efficient inference for policy values in nonparametric Markov decision processes (MDPs), but existing methods face two major obstacles: (1) they require stringent intertemporal overlap conditions…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-14 Lars van der Laan , David Hubbard , Allen Tran , Nathan Kallus , Aurélien Bibaut

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown its promising capabilities to learn optimal policies directly from trial and error. However, learning can be hindered if the goal of the learning, defined by the reward function, is "not optimal".…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-10-09 Yizheng Zhang , Andre Rosendo

We study the problem of deployment efficient reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation under the \emph{reward-free} exploration setting. This is a well-motivated problem because deploying new policies is costly in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Dan Qiao , Yu-Xiang Wang

The optimal dispatch of energy storage systems (ESSs) presents formidable challenges due to the uncertainty introduced by fluctuations in dynamic prices, demand consumption, and renewable-based energy generation. By exploiting the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-07-27 Shengren Hou , Edgar Mauricio Salazar Duque , Peter Palensky , Pedro P. Vergara

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) faces significant challenges in addressing the hard-exploration problems in tasks with sparse or deceptive rewards and large state spaces. These challenges severely limit the practical application of DRL.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-03 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Ning Guo , Zhiming Zheng

In this work, we take a first step toward elucidating the mechanisms behind emergent exploration in unsupervised reinforcement learning. We study Single-Goal Contrastive Reinforcement Learning (SGCRL), a self-supervised algorithm capable of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Mahsa Bastankhah , Grace Liu , Dilip Arumugam , Thomas L. Griffiths , Benjamin Eysenbach

This paper bridges some of the gap between optimal planning and reinforcement learning (RL), both of which share roots in dynamic programming applied to sequential decision making or optimal control. Whereas planning typically favors…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Filip V. Georgiev , Kalle G. Timperi , Başak Sakçak , Steven M. LaValle

Learning to imitate expert behavior from demonstrations can be challenging, especially in environments with high-dimensional, continuous observations and unknown dynamics. Supervised learning methods based on behavioral cloning (BC) suffer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-27 Siddharth Reddy , Anca D. Dragan , Sergey Levine

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) powered by neural net approximation of the Q function has had enormous empirical success. While the theory of RL has traditionally focused on linear function approximation (or eluder dimension) approaches,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Baihe Huang , Kaixuan Huang , Sham M. Kakade , Jason D. Lee , Qi Lei , Runzhe Wang , Jiaqi Yang

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) exploits temporal abstraction to solve large Markov Decision Processes (MDP) and provide transferable subtask policies. In this paper, we introduce an off-policy HRL algorithm: Hierarchical Q-value…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-03-30 Tiancheng Zhao , Mohammad Gowayyed

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) effectively improves agents' exploration efficiency on tasks with sparse reward, with the guide of high-quality hierarchical structures (e.g., subgoals or options). However, how to automatically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Shaohui Peng , Xing Hu , Rui Zhang , Ke Tang , Jiaming Guo , Qi Yi , Ruizhi Chen , Xishan Zhang , Zidong Du , Ling Li , Qi Guo , Yunji Chen

A major challenge of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world applications is the variation between environments, tasks or clients. Meta-RL (MRL) addresses this issue by learning a meta-policy that adapts to new tasks. Standard MRL methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Ido Greenberg , Shie Mannor , Gal Chechik , Eli Meirom

Despite of achieving great success in real-world applications, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is still suffering from three critical issues, i.e., data efficiency, lack of the interpretability and transferability. Recent research shows…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-07-10 Hankz Hankui Zhuo , Shuting Deng , Mu Jin , Zhihao Ma , Kebing Jin , Chen Chen , Chao Yu