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Though reinforcement learning has greatly benefited from the incorporation of neural networks, the inability to verify the correctness of such systems limits their use. Current work in explainable deep learning focuses on explaining only a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-30 Nicholay Topin , Manuela Veloso

Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning are a successful approach for a variety of reasons: they are model free, they directly optimize the performance metric of interest, and they allow for richly parameterized policies.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-14 Alekh Agarwal , Mikael Henaff , Sham Kakade , Wen Sun

Multi-objective optimization models that encode ordered sequential constraints provide a solution to model various challenging problems including encoding preferences, modeling a curriculum, and enforcing measures of safety. A recently…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Kyle Hollins Wray , Stas Tiomkin , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Pieter Abbeel

The recent emergence of reinforcement learning has created a demand for robust statistical inference methods for the parameter estimates computed using these algorithms. Existing methods for statistical inference in online learning are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-29 Pratik Ramprasad , Yuantong Li , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Will Wei Sun , Guang Cheng

Although well-established in general reinforcement learning (RL), value-based methods are rarely explored in constrained RL (CRL) for their incapability of finding policies that can randomize among multiple actions. To apply value-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Tianchi Cai , Wenpeng Zhang , Lihong Gu , Xiaodong Zeng , Jinjie Gu

Projected policy gradient under the simplex parameterization, policy gradient and natural policy gradient under the softmax parameterization, are fundamental algorithms in reinforcement learning. There have been a flurry of recent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-12 Jiacai Liu , Wenye Li , Ke Wei

The classical policy gradient method is the theoretical and conceptual foundation of modern policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Most rigorous analyses of such methods, particularly those establishing convergence guarantees,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Jongmin Lee , Ernest K. Ryu

We investigate the problem of best policy identification in discounted linear Markov Decision Processes in the fixed confidence setting under a generative model. We first derive an instance-specific lower bound on the expected number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-12 Jerome Taupin , Yassir Jedra , Alexandre Proutiere

We study the $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-PAC policy identification problem in finite-horizon episodic Markov Decision Processes. Existing approaches provide finite-time guarantees for approximate settings ($\varepsilon>0$) but suffer from high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Cyrille Kone , Kevin Jamieson

We consider infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision processes and study the convergence rates of the natural policy gradient (NPG) and the Q-NPG methods with the log-linear policy class. Using the compatible function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Rui Yuan , Simon S. Du , Robert M. Gower , Alessandro Lazaric , Lin Xiao

We introduce a new framework that performs decision-making in reinforcement learning (RL) as an iterative reasoning process. We model agent behavior as the steady-state distribution of a parameterized reasoning Markov chain (RMC), optimized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Edoardo Cetin , Oya Celiktutan

We introduce a novel training procedure for policy gradient methods wherein episodic memory is used to optimize the hyperparameters of reinforcement learning algorithms on-the-fly. Unlike other hyperparameter searches, we formulate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Hung Le , Majid Abdolshah , Thommen K. George , Kien Do , Dung Nguyen , Svetha Venkatesh

Reinforcement Learning, particularly through policy gradient methods, has played a central role in enabling reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. However, the optimization stability of policy gradients in this setting remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Luckeciano C. Melo , Alessandro Abate , Yarin Gal

We investigate the challenge of parametrizing policies for reinforcement learning (RL) in high-dimensional continuous action spaces. Our objective is to develop a multimodal policy that overcomes limitations inherent in the commonly-used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Zhiao Huang , Litian Liang , Zhan Ling , Xuanlin Li , Chuang Gan , Hao Su

Sequential decision making in the real world often requires finding a good balance of conflicting objectives. In general, there exist a plethora of Pareto-optimal policies that embody different patterns of compromises between objectives,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Takuya Kanazawa , Chetan Gupta

Sequence-to-sequence architectures built upon recurrent neural networks have become a standard choice for multi-step-ahead time series prediction. In these models, the decoder produces future values conditioned on contextual inputs,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Qi Sima , Xinze Zhang , Yukun Bao , Siyue Yang , Liang Shen

The problem of how to take the right actions to make profits in sequential process continues to be difficult due to the quick dynamics and a significant amount of uncertainty in many application scenarios. In such complicated environments,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Zhendong Shi , Xiaoli Wei , Ercan E. Kuruoglu

We propose risk-sensitive reinforcement learning algorithms catering to three families of risk measures, namely expectiles, utility-based shortfall risk and optimized certainty equivalent risk. For each risk measure, in the context of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Sumedh Gupte , Shrey Rakeshkumar Patel , Soumen Pachal , Prashanth L. A. , Sanjay P. Bhat

This paper introduces a model-based approach for training feedback controllers for an autonomous agent operating in a highly nonlinear (albeit deterministic) environment. We desire the trained policy to ensure that the agent satisfies…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-29 Navid Hashemi , Bardh Hoxha , Danil Prokhorov , Georgios Fainekos , Jyotirmoy Deshmukh

Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), primarily due to the curse of dimensionality induced by the non-stationarity of optimal policies. In this work,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-20 Semih Cayci , Atilla Eryilmaz