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While Value Iteration (VI) is one of the most fundamental algorithms in Reinforcement Learning, its theoretical convergence guarantees still exhibit a persistent mismatch with empirical behavior. In the discounted-reward case, classical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Arsenii Mustafin , Xinyi Sheng , Dominik Baumann

We study the problem of generalizing an expert agent's behavior, provided through demonstrations, to new environments and/or additional constraints. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) offers a promising solution by seeking to recover the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Filippo Lazzati , Alberto Maria Metelli

Reinforcement learning algorithms describe how an agent can learn an optimal action policy in a sequential decision process, through repeated experience. In a given environment, the agent policy provides him some running and terminal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-03-24 Arthur Charpentier , Romuald Elie , Carl Remlinger

Machine learning algorithms learn to solve a task, but are unable to improve their ability to learn. Meta-learning methods learn about machine learning algorithms and improve them so that they learn more quickly. However, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Calarina Muslimani , Alex Lewandowski , Dale Schuurmans , Matthew E. Taylor , Jun Luo

Recent advances in reinforcement-learning research have demonstrated impressive results in building algorithms that can out-perform humans in complex tasks. Nevertheless, creating reinforcement-learning systems that can build abstractions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Lucas Lehnert , Michael J. Frank , Michael L. Littman

We consider the problem of imitation learning from a finite set of expert trajectories, without access to reinforcement signals. The classical approach of extracting the expert's reward function via inverse reinforcement learning, followed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Ruohan Wang , Carlo Ciliberto , Pierluigi Amadori , Yiannis Demiris

Reinforcement learning optimizes policies for expected cumulative reward. Need the supervision be so narrow? Reward is delayed and sparse for many tasks, making it a difficult and impoverished signal for end-to-end optimization. To augment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-10 Evan Shelhamer , Parsa Mahmoudieh , Max Argus , Trevor Darrell

Preference-based reward learning is a popular technique for teaching robots and autonomous systems how a human user wants them to perform a task. Previous works have shown that actively synthesizing preference queries to maximize…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Evan Ellis , Gaurav R. Ghosal , Stuart J. Russell , Anca Dragan , Erdem Bıyık

In reinforcement learning, the discount factor $\gamma$ controls the agent's effective planning horizon. Traditionally, this parameter was considered part of the MDP; however, as deep reinforcement learning algorithms tend to become…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Chen Tessler , Shie Mannor

Policy gradient methods, which have been extensively studied in the last decade, offer an effective and efficient framework for reinforcement learning problems. However, their performances can often be unsatisfactory, suffering from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Shihab Ahmed , El Houcine Bergou , Aritra Dutta , Yue Wang

Using deep neural nets as function approximator for reinforcement learning tasks have recently been shown to be very powerful for solving problems approaching real-world complexity. Using these results as a benchmark, we discuss the role…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-01-21 Vincent François-Lavet , Raphael Fonteneau , Damien Ernst

Recently proposed reward-conditioned policies (RCPs) offer an appealing alternative in reinforcement learning. Compared with policy gradient methods, policy learning in RCPs is simpler since it is based on supervised learning, and unlike…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Kai Xu , Farid Tajaddodianfar , Ben Allison

Goals for reinforcement learning problems are typically defined through hand-specified rewards. To design such problems, developers of learning algorithms must inherently be aware of what the task goals are, yet we often require agents to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-29 Ashley D. Edwards , Laura Downs , James C. Davidson

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents have traditionally been tasked with maximizing the value function of a Markov decision process (MDP), either in continuous settings, with fixed discount factor $\gamma < 1$, or in episodic settings, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-11 Silviu Pitis

It is well known that ensemble methods often provide enhanced performance in reinforcement learning. In this paper, we explore this concept further by using group-aided training within the distributional reinforcement learning paradigm.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-25 Björn Lindenberg , Jonas Nordqvist , Karl-Olof Lindahl

Imitation learning algorithms learn a policy from demonstrations of expert behavior. We show that, for deterministic experts, imitation learning can be done by reduction to reinforcement learning with a stationary reward. Our theoretical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-16 Kamil Ciosek

The analysis of Temporal Difference (TD) learning in the average-reward setting faces notable theoretical difficulties because the Bellman operator is not contractive with respect to any norm. This complicates standard analyses of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Haoxing Tian , Zaiwei Chen , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Alex Olshevsky

The average-reward formulation of reinforcement learning (RL) has drawn increased interest in recent years for its ability to solve temporally-extended problems without relying on discounting. Meanwhile, in the discounted setting,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Jacob Adamczyk , Volodymyr Makarenko , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

The endeavor of artificial intelligence (AI) is to design autonomous agents capable of achieving complex tasks. Namely, reinforcement learning (RL) proposes a theoretical background to learn optimal behaviors. In practice, RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Firas Jarboui , Ahmed Akakzia

Growing advancements in reinforcement learning has led to advancements in control theory. Reinforcement learning has effectively solved the inverted pendulum problem and more recently the double inverted pendulum problem. In reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-26 Amartya Mukherjee