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The reinforcement learning (RL) problem is rife with sources of non-stationarity, making it a notoriously difficult problem domain for the application of neural networks. We identify a mechanism by which non-stationary prediction targets…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-05 Clare Lyle , Mark Rowland , Will Dabney

Reinforcement Learning (RL) environments can produce training data with spurious correlations between features due to the amount of training data or its limited feature coverage. This can lead to RL agents encoding these misleading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Mhairi Dunion , Trevor McInroe , Kevin Sebastian Luck , Josiah P. Hanna , Stefano V. Albrecht

Recent advances in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to large language models (LLMs) have led to substantial progress. In particular, a series of remarkable yet often counterintuitive phenomena have been reported in LLMs, exhibiting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Haoze Wu , Cheng Wang , Wenshuo Zhao , Junxian He

The conventional wisdom behind learning deep classification models is to focus on bad-classified examples and ignore well-classified examples that are far from the decision boundary. For instance, when training with cross-entropy loss,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-17 Guangxiang Zhao , Wenkai Yang , Xuancheng Ren , Lei Li , Yunfang Wu , Xu Sun

The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-25 Wuxia Chen , Taposh Banerjee , Jemin George , Carl Busart

We propose a novel approach to addressing two fundamental challenges in Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL): the computational expense of repeatedly finding a good policy in the learned model, and the objective mismatch between model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Anirudh Vemula , Yuda Song , Aarti Singh , J. Andrew Bagnell , Sanjiban Choudhury

The broad set of deep generative models (DGMs) has achieved remarkable advances. However, it is often difficult to incorporate rich structured domain knowledge with the end-to-end DGMs. Posterior regularization (PR) offers a principled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-21 Zhiting Hu , Zichao Yang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Xiaodan Liang , Lianhui Qin , Haoye Dong , Eric Xing

Fine-tuning is a widespread technique that allows practitioners to transfer pre-trained capabilities, as recently showcased by the successful applications of foundation models. However, fine-tuning reinforcement learning (RL) models remains…

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) suffers from exploration inefficiency, where models struggle to generate successful rollouts, resulting in minimal learning signal. This challenge is particularly severe for tasks that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Saaket Agashe , Jayanth Srinivasa , Gaowen Liu , Ramana Kompella , Xin Eric Wang

In model-based reinforcement learning, most algorithms rely on simulating trajectories from one-step models of the dynamics learned on data. A critical challenge of this approach is the compounding of one-step prediction errors as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Abdelhakim Benechehab , Albert Thomas , Giuseppe Paolo , Maurizio Filippone , Balázs Kégl

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

The robustness of any machine learning solution is fundamentally bound by the data it was trained on. One way to generalize beyond the original training is through human-informed augmentation of the original dataset; however, it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-08 Nicholas A. Ketz , Praveen K. Pilly

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a highly effective technique for addressing various scientific and applied problems. Despite its success, certain complex tasks remain challenging to be addressed solely with a single model and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Yanjie Song , P. N. Suganthan , Witold Pedrycz , Junwei Ou , Yongming He , Yingwu Chen , Yutong Wu

In the quest for efficient and robust reinforcement learning methods, both model-free and model-based approaches offer advantages. In this paper we propose a new way of explicitly bridging both approaches via a shared low-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Vincent François-Lavet , Yoshua Bengio , Doina Precup , Joelle Pineau

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great empirical success in various application domains. The theoretical aspects of the problem have been extensively studied over past decades, particularly under tabular and linear Markov Decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Sattar Vakili

The notion of developing statistical methods in machine learning which are robust to adversarial perturbations in the underlying data has been the subject of increasing interest in recent years. A common feature of this work is that the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-02-28 Dimitris Bertsimas , Martin S. Copenhaver

Bearing faults in rotating machinery can lead to significant operational disruptions and maintenance costs. Modern methods for bearing fault diagnosis rely heavily on vibration analysis and machine learning techniques, which often require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Efe Çakır , Patrick Dumond

A challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning is to be able to generalize over intractable state-action spaces. Inspired from Tesseract [Mahajan et al., 2021], this position paper investigates generalisation in state-action space over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Pascal Van Der Vaart , Anuj Mahajan , Shimon Whiteson

A fundamental question in the theory of reinforcement learning is: suppose the optimal $Q$-function lies in the linear span of a given $d$ dimensional feature mapping, is sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) possible? The recent and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Yuanhao Wang , Ruosong Wang , Sham M. Kakade

Reinforcement learning with outcome-based feedback faces a fundamental challenge: when rewards are only observed at trajectory endpoints, how do we assign credit to the right actions? This paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Fan Chen , Zeyu Jia , Alexander Rakhlin , Tengyang Xie