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Robotic systems must be able to quickly and robustly make decisions when operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) can be used to compute optimal policies with little prior knowledge about the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-09-13 Yunpeng Pan , Xinyan Yan , Evangelos Theodorou , Byron Boots

Generative models have emerged as a powerful class of policies for offline reinforcement learning (RL) due to their ability to capture complex, multi-modal behaviors. However, existing methods face a stark trade-off: slow, iterative models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Xinsong Feng , Leshu Tang , Chenan Wang , Haipeng Chen

The problem of selecting the right state-representation in a reinforcement learning problem is considered. Several models (functions mapping past observations to a finite set) of the observations are given, and it is known that for at least…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-02-12 Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Rémi Munos , Daniil Ryabko

Learning a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from a fixed batch of trajectories is a non-trivial task whose outcome's quality depends on both the amount and the diversity of the sampled regions of the state-action space. Yet, many MDPs are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Giorgio Angelotti , Nicolas Drougard , Caroline P. C. Chanel

We study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation. For episodic time-inhomogeneous linear Markov decision processes (linear MDPs) whose transition probability can be parameterized as a linear function of a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Jiafan He , Heyang Zhao , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

Reinforcement learning in non-stationary environments is challenging due to abrupt and unpredictable changes in dynamics, often causing traditional algorithms to fail to converge. However, in many real-world cases, non-stationarity has some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Mohsen Amiri , Sindri Magnússon

Stochastic and soft optimal policies resulting from entropy-regularized Markov decision processes (ER-MDP) are desirable for exploration and imitation learning applications. Motivated by the fact that such policies are sensitive with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Tien Mai , Patrick Jaillet

Off-policy dynamic programming (DP) techniques such as $Q$-learning have proven to be important in sequential decision-making problems. In the presence of function approximation, however, these techniques often diverge due to the absence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Zhaoyi Zhou , Chuning Zhu , Runlong Zhou , Qiwen Cui , Abhishek Gupta , Simon Shaolei Du

We consider a new form of reinforcement learning (RL) that is based on opportunities to directly learn the optimal control policy and a general Markov decision process (MDP) framework devised to support these opportunities. Derivations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-02 Yingdong Lu , Mark S. Squillante , Chai Wah Wu

We study the problem of online learning in a class of Markov decision processes known as linearly solvable MDPs. In the stationary version of this problem, a learner interacts with its environment by directly controlling the state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-07 Gergely Neu , Vicenç Gómez

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically rely on the assumption that the environment dynamics and value function can be expressed in terms of a Markovian state representation. However, when state information is only partially observable,…

Among the reasons hindering reinforcement learning (RL) applications to real-world problems, two factors are critical: limited data and the mismatch between the testing environment (real environment in which the policy is deployed) and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Xiaoteng Ma , Zhipeng Liang , Jose Blanchet , Mingwen Liu , Li Xia , Jiheng Zhang , Qianchuan Zhao , Zhengyuan Zhou

We investigate robustness to strong data corruption in offline sparse reinforcement learning (RL). In our setting, an adversary may arbitrarily perturb a fraction of the collected trajectories from a high-dimensional but sparse Markov…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-13 Nam Phuong Tran , Andi Nika , Goran Radanovic , Long Tran-Thanh , Debmalya Mandal

Several recent works have proposed a class of algorithms for the offline reinforcement learning (RL) problem that we will refer to as return-conditioned supervised learning (RCSL). RCSL algorithms learn the distribution of actions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-12 David Brandfonbrener , Alberto Bietti , Jacob Buckman , Romain Laroche , Joan Bruna

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) under the average-reward criterion is essential for long-term decision-making, particularly when the environment may differ from its specification. However, a significant gap exists in understanding the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Zachary Roch , Chi Zhang , George Atia , Yue Wang

Trajectory-based data attribution methods estimate the influence of training samples on model predictions by unrolling the training trajectory. They are widely used in applications such as data selection, data valuation, and model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Junwei Deng , Pingbang Hu , Suliang Jin , Hao Lu , Jiachen T. Wang , Shichang Zhang , Jiaqi W. Ma

Training autonomous agents with sparse rewards is a long-standing problem in online reinforcement learning (RL), due to low data efficiency. Prior work overcomes this challenge by extracting useful knowledge from offline data, often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Qianlan Yang , Yu-Xiong Wang

We present a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm to find an optimal policy for a finite-horizon Markov decision process while guaranteeing a desired lower bound on the probability of satisfying a signal temporal logic (STL)…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-09-29 Krishna C. Kalagarla , Rahul Jain , Pierluigi Nuzzo

Reinforcementlearning(RL)folkloresuggeststhathistory-basedfunctionapproximationmethods,suchas recurrent neural nets or history-based state abstraction, perform better than their memory-less counterparts, due to the fact that function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Gandharv Patil , Aditya Mahajan , Doina Precup

Time-inhomogeneous finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDP) are frequently employed to model decision-making in dynamic treatment regimes and other statistical reinforcement learning (RL) scenarios. These fields, especially healthcare…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Elynn Chen , Sai Li , Michael I. Jordan