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In learning theory, the performance of an online policy is commonly measured in terms of the static regret metric, which compares the cumulative loss of an online policy to that of an optimal benchmark in hindsight. In the definition of…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Ativ Joshi , Abhishek Sinha

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov Decision Processes in which an agent repeatedly interacts with an environment that is modeled by a controlled Markov process. At each time step $t$, it earns a reward, and also incurs a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Rahul Singh , Abhishek Gupta , Ness B. Shroff

Distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that performs the best under the worst environment within an uncertainty set using an offline dataset collected from a nominal model. While recent advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Ruiquan Huang , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated a huge potential in learning optimal policies without any prior knowledge of the process to be controlled. Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a popular control technique which is able to deal with…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-04-10 Mario Zanon , Sébastien Gros , Alberto Bemporad

Online learning algorithms have been successfully used to design caching policies with sublinear regret in the total number of requests, with no statistical assumption about the request sequence. Most existing algorithms involve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Younes Ben Mazziane , Francescomaria Faticanti , Sara Alouf , Giovanni Neglia

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is a powerful framework for learning complex behaviors from expert demonstrations. However, it traditionally requires repeatedly solving a computationally expensive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-09 David Wu , Gokul Swamy , J. Andrew Bagnell , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Sanjiban Choudhury

Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) generally suffers from poor sample complexity, mostly due to the need to exhaustively explore the state-action space to find well-performing policies. On the other hand, we postulate that expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Loris Di Natale , Bratislav Svetozarevic , Philipp Heer , Colin N. Jones

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a sub-domain of machine learning, mainly concerned with solving sequential decision-making problems by a learning agent that interacts with the decision environment to improve its behavior through the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Hossein Hassani , Ehsan Hallaji , Roozbeh Razavi-Far , Mehrdad Saif , Liang Lin

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) looks at learning how to optimally solve tasks using a fixed dataset of interactions from the environment. Many off-policy algorithms developed for online learning struggle in the offline setting as they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Natinael Solomon Neggatu , Jeremie Houssineau , Giovanni Montana

We consider model-free reinforcement learning (RL) in non-stationary Markov decision processes. Both the reward functions and the state transition functions are allowed to vary arbitrarily over time as long as their cumulative variations do…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Weichao Mao , Kaiqing Zhang , Ruihao Zhu , David Simchi-Levi , Tamer Başar

Recently, there has been a surge in interest in safe and robust techniques within reinforcement learning (RL). Current notions of risk in RL fail to capture the potential for systemic failures such as abrupt stoppages from system failures…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-10-09 David Mguni

Reinforcement learning (RL) policies trained in simulation often suffer from severe performance degradation when deployed in real-world environments due to non-stationary dynamics. While Domain Randomization (DR) and meta-RL have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Aoi Yoshimura , Gouhei Tanaka

Applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems is often made challenging by the inability to interact with the environment and the difficulty of designing reward functions. Offline RL addresses the first challenge by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Alizée Pace , Bernhard Schölkopf , Gunnar Rätsch , Giorgia Ramponi

We study the problems of offline and online contextual optimization with feedback information, where instead of observing the loss, we observe, after-the-fact, the optimal action an oracle with full knowledge of the objective function would…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Omar Besbes , Yuri Fonseca , Ilan Lobel

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for learning safe behaviors without engaging in risky online interactions with the environment. Most existing methods in offline safe RL rely on cost constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Ze Gong , Akshat Kumar , Pradeep Varakantham

To obtain a near-optimal policy with fewer interactions in Reinforcement Learning (RL), a promising approach involves the combination of offline RL, which enhances sample efficiency by leveraging offline datasets, and online RL, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-18 Xiaoyu Wen , Xudong Yu , Rui Yang , Haoyuan Chen , Chenjia Bai , Zhen Wang

We study the problem of learning optimal behavior from sub-optimal datasets for goal-conditioned offline reinforcement learning under sparse rewards, invertible actions and deterministic transitions. To mitigate the effects of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Alfredo Reichlin , Miguel Vasco , Hang Yin , Danica Kragic

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

As humans, our goals and our environment are persistently changing throughout our lifetime based on our experiences, actions, and internal and external drives. In contrast, typical reinforcement learning problem set-ups consider decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Annie Xie , James Harrison , Chelsea Finn

Online matching problems arise in many complex systems, from cloud services and online marketplaces to organ exchange networks, where timely, principled decisions are critical for maintaining high system performance. Traditional heuristics…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-09 Chiara Mignacco , Matthieu Jonckheere , Gilles Stoltz