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The energy transition has increased the reliance on intermittent energy sources, destabilizing energy markets and causing unprecedented volatility, culminating in the global energy crisis of 2021. In addition to harming producers and…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2023-08-07 Jonas Hanetho

Real-world decision-making problems are often partially observable, and many can be formulated as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). When we apply reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to the POMDP, reasonable…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Soichiro Nishimori , Sotetsu Koyamada , Shin Ishii

Policy gradient (PG) is a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that optimizes a parameterized policy model for an expected return using gradient ascent. While PG can work well even in non-Markovian environments, it may encounter plateaus or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Tetsuro Morimura , Kazuhiro Ota , Kenshi Abe , Peinan Zhang

When using a tool, the grasps used for picking it up, reposing, and holding it in a suitable pose for the desired task could be distinct. Therefore, a key challenge for autonomous in-hand tool manipulation is finding a sequence of grasps…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-04-06 Ethan K. Gordon , Rana Soltani Zarrin

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), regularization has emerged as a popular tool both in theory and practice, typically based either on an entropy bonus or a Kullback-Leibler divergence that constrains successive policies. In practice, these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Alena Shilova , Alex Davey , Brahim Driss , Riad Akrour

Reinforcement learning~(RL) is a versatile framework for learning to solve complex real-world tasks. However, influences on the learning performance of RL algorithms are often poorly understood in practice. We discuss different analysis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Jan Schneider , Pierre Schumacher , Daniel Häufle , Bernhard Schölkopf , Dieter Büchler

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) addresses sequential decision-making problems where agents are required to achieve goals by maximizing the expected return while meeting domain-specific constraints. In this setting, policy-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Alessandro Montenegro , Leonardo Cesani , Marco Mussi , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli

Scaling reinforcement learning to tens of thousands of parallel environments requires overcoming the limited exploration capacity of a single policy. Ensemble-based policy gradient methods, which employ multiple policies to collect diverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Naoki Shitanda , Motoki Omura , Tatsuya Harada , Takayuki Osa

Deep Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning methods have empirically shown great promise in tackling challenging combinatorial problems. In those methods a deep neural network is used as a solution generator which is then trained by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Constantine Caramanis , Dimitris Fotakis , Alkis Kalavasis , Vasilis Kontonis , Christos Tzamos

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved significant breakthroughs in various tasks. However, most DRL algorithms suffer a problem of generalizing the learned policy which makes the learning performance largely affected even by minor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-11 Zhengyao Jiang , Shan Luo

Learning to evaluate and improve policies is a core problem of Reinforcement Learning (RL). Traditional RL algorithms learn a value function defined for a single policy. A recently explored competitive alternative is to learn a single value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Francesco Faccio , Aditya Ramesh , Vincent Herrmann , Jean Harb , Jürgen Schmidhuber

Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) has emerged as a unifying framework in reinforcement learning (RL) by linking policy gradient methods with a first-order optimization method known as mirror descent. At its core, PMD incorporates two key…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Jan Felix Kleuker , Aske Plaat , Thomas Moerland

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), the goal of agents is to discover an optimal policy that maximizes the expected cumulative rewards. This objective may also be viewed as finding a policy that optimizes a linear function of its state-action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Navdeep Kumar , Kaixin Wang , Kfir Levy , Shie Mannor

This paper proposes a novel termination criterion, termed the advantage gap function, for finite state and action Markov decision processes (MDP) and reinforcement learning (RL). By incorporating this advantage gap function into the design…

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

The multidimensional Uncertain Volatility Model leads to robust option pricing problems under joint volatility and correlation uncertainty. Their numerical resolution quickly becomes challenging because the associated stochastic control…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2026-05-11 Lokman A Abbas-Turki , Jean-François Chassagneux , Jean-Philippe Lemor , Grégoire Loeper , Simon Sananes

Policy gradient methods are a vital ingredient behind the success of modern reinforcement learning. Modern policy gradient methods, although successful, introduce a residual error in gradient estimation. In this work, we argue that this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Pulkit Katdare , Anant Joshi , Katherine Driggs-Campbell

We introduce a novel class of algorithms to efficiently approximate the unknown return distributions in policy evaluation problems from distributional reinforcement learning (DRL). The proposed distributional dynamic programming algorithms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-22 Julian Gerstenberg , Ralph Neininger , Denis Spiegel

In order to compute near-optimal policies with policy-gradient algorithms, it is common in practice to include intrinsic exploration terms in the learning objective. Although the effectiveness of these terms is usually justified by an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

Multi-objective optimization models that encode ordered sequential constraints provide a solution to model various challenging problems including encoding preferences, modeling a curriculum, and enforcing measures of safety. A recently…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Kyle Hollins Wray , Stas Tiomkin , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Pieter Abbeel

Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) is a generalization of traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) that aims to optimize multiple, often conflicting objectives simultaneously rather than focusing on a single reward. This approach…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Davide Guidobene , Lorenzo Benedetti , Diego Arapovic