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Replicability is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), as RL algorithms are empirically observed to be unstable and sensitive to variations in training conditions. To formally address this issue, we study \emph{list…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Bohan Zhang , Michael Chen , A. Pavan , N. V. Vinodchandran , Lin F. Yang , Ruosong Wang

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy that identifies the best action for each state. However, in healthcare settings, many actions may be near-equivalent with respect to the reward (e.g., survival). We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-27 Shengpu Tang , Aditya Modi , Michael W. Sjoding , Jenna Wiens

Ordinal regression and ranking are challenging due to inherent ordinal dependencies that conventional methods struggle to model. We propose Ranking-Aware Reinforcement Learning (RARL), a novel RL framework that explicitly learns these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Aiming Hao , Chen Zhu , Jiashu Zhu , Jiahong Wu , Xiangxiang Chu

Reinforcement learning (RL) in large environments often suffers from severe computational bottlenecks, as conventional regret minimization algorithms require repeated, costly calls to planning and statistical estimation oracles. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Haichen Hu , Jian Qian , David Simchi-Levi

Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Aviral Kumar , Xue Bin Peng , Sergey Levine

We investigate a paradigm in multi-task reinforcement learning (MT-RL) in which an agent is placed in an environment and needs to learn to perform a series of tasks, within this space. Since the environment does not change, there is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-03-08 Diana Borsa , Thore Graepel , John Shawe-Taylor

Reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for data science decision-making but suffers from sample inefficiency, particularly in real-world scenarios with costly physical interactions. This paper introduces a novel human-inspired framework to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Ali Beikmohammadi , Sindri Magnússon

We study learning optimal policies from a logged dataset, i.e., offline RL, with function approximation. Despite the efforts devoted, existing algorithms with theoretic finite-sample guarantees typically assume exploratory data coverage or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Chenjie Mao

Model-based offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) constructs environment models from offline datasets to perform conservative policy optimization. Existing approaches focus on learning state transitions through ensemble models, rollouting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Hongye Cao , Fan Feng , Jing Huo , Shangdong Yang , Meng Fang , Tianpei Yang , Yang Gao

We study constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) from a novel perspective by setting constraints directly on state density functions, rather than the value functions considered by previous works. State density has a clear physical and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Zengyi Qin , Yuxiao Chen , Chuchu Fan

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems over general state and action spaces are notoriously challenging. In contrast to the tableau setting, one can not enumerate all the states and then iteratively update the policies for each state. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

The Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP) framework focuses on designing control policies that are robust against the parameter uncertainties due to the mismatches between the simulator model and real-world settings. An RMDP problem is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Kishan Panaganti , Dileep Kalathil

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

Researchers have demonstrated that Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a powerful tool for finding policies that perform well on complex robotic systems. However, these policies are often unpredictable and can induce highly variable…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Sean Gillen , Asutay Ozmen , Katie Byl

Model-Free Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms either learn how to map states to expected rewards or search for policies that can maximize a certain performance function. Model-Based algorithms instead, aim to learn an approximation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Juan Cardenas-Cartagena , Massimiliano Falzari , Marco Zullich , Matthia Sabatelli

In recent years, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been applied to real-world problems with increasing success. Such applications often require to put constraints on the agent's behavior. Existing algorithms for constrained RL (CRL) rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Ted Moskovitz , Brendan O'Donoghue , Vivek Veeriah , Sebastian Flennerhag , Satinder Singh , Tom Zahavy

When using reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms it is common, given a large state space, to introduce some form of approximation architecture for the value function (VF). The exact form of this architecture can have a significant effect…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Edward Barker , Charl Ras

On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated great potential in robotic control, where effective exploration is crucial for efficient and high-quality policy learning. However, how to encourage the agent to explore the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Leixin Chang , Xinchen Yao , Ben Liu , Liangjing Yang , Hua Chen

Offline policy learning is aimed at learning decision-making policies using existing datasets of trajectories without collecting additional data. The primary motivation for using reinforcement learning (RL) instead of supervised learning…

In real-world tasks, reinforcement learning (RL) agents frequently encounter situations that are not present during training time. To ensure reliable performance, the RL agents need to exhibit robustness against worst-case situations. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Sebastian Curi , Ilija Bogunovic , Andreas Krause