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We consider a control problem for a finite-state Markov system whose performance is evaluated by a coherent Markov risk measure. For each policy, the risk of a state is approximated by a function of its features, thus leading to a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-05 Andrzej Ruszczynski , Shangzhe Yang

Reinforcement learning is structurally harder than supervised learning because the policy changes the data distribution it learns from. The resulting fragility is especially visible in large-model training, where the training and rollout…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Rasool Fakoor , Murdock Aubry , Nicholas Stranges , Alexander J. Smola

We investigate model-based reinforcement learning in contextual Markov decision processes (C-MDPs) in which the context is unobserved and induces confounding in the offline dataset. In such settings, conventional model-learning methods are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Nishanth Venkatesh , Andreas A. Malikopoulos

Overparameterized models have proven to be powerful tools for solving various machine learning tasks. However, overparameterization often leads to a substantial increase in computational and memory costs, which in turn requires extensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Soo Min Kwon , Zekai Zhang , Dogyoon Song , Laura Balzano , Qing Qu

We study the problem of learning optimal behavior from sub-optimal datasets for goal-conditioned offline reinforcement learning under sparse rewards, invertible actions and deterministic transitions. To mitigate the effects of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Alfredo Reichlin , Miguel Vasco , Hang Yin , Danica Kragic

We study the training dynamics of a shallow neural network with quadratic activation functions and quadratic cost in a teacher-student setup. In line with previous works on the same neural architecture, the optimization is performed…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-08 Simon Martin , Francis Bach , Giulio Biroli

Large scale reinforcement learning has become a central tool for improving reasoning in large language models. At this scale, generation is often lagged or asynchronous, so updates are performed on data collected by older policies. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Otmane Sakhi , Aleksei Arzhantsev , Imad Aouali , Flavian Vasile

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) have received rising interest due to its appealing data efficiency. The present study addresses behavior estimation, a task that lays the foundation of many offline RL algorithms. Behavior estimation aims…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Guoxi Zhang , Hisashi Kashima

We study the computational complexity of approximating general constrained Markov decision processes. Our primary contribution is the design of a polynomial time $(0,\epsilon)$-additive bicriteria approximation algorithm for finding optimal…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Jeremy McMahan

Temporal-Difference learning (TD) [Sutton, 1988] with function approximation can converge to solutions that are worse than those obtained by Monte-Carlo regression, even in the simple case of on-policy evaluation. To increase our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-10 Hugo Penedones , Damien Vincent , Hartmut Maennel , Sylvain Gelly , Timothy Mann , Andre Barreto

TD($\lambda$) with function approximation has proved empirically successful for some complex reinforcement learning problems. For linear approximation, TD($\lambda$) has been shown to minimise the squared error between the approximate value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Lex Weaver , Jonathan Baxter

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods rely on experience replay to approximate the minibatched supervised learning setting; however, unlike supervised learning where access to lots of training data is crucial to generalization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Brett Daley , Cameron Hickert , Christopher Amato

Neural networks trained via gradient descent with random initialization and without any regularization enjoy good generalization performance in practice despite being highly overparametrized. A promising direction to explain this phenomenon…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Hancheng Min , Salma Tarmoun , Rene Vidal , Enrique Mallada

Off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms promise to be applicable in settings where only a fixed data-set (batch) of environment interactions is available and no new experience can be acquired. This property makes these algorithms…

In a series of recent theoretical works, it was shown that strongly over-parameterized neural networks trained with gradient-based methods could converge exponentially fast to zero training loss, with their parameters hardly varying. In…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-08 Lenaic Chizat , Edouard Oyallon , Francis Bach

Target tracking in a camera network is an important task for surveillance and scene understanding. The task is challenging due to disjoint views and illumination variation in different cameras. In this direction, many graph-based methods…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-12-04 Anil Sharma , Prabhat Kumar , Saket Anand , Sanjit K. Kaul

Theoretical studies on transfer learning or domain adaptation have so far focused on situations with a known hypothesis class or model; however in practice, some amount of model selection is usually involved, often appearing under the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-13 Steve Hanneke , Samory Kpotufe , Yasaman Mahdaviyeh

The dominant framework for off-policy multi-goal reinforcement learning involves estimating goal conditioned Q-value function. When learning to achieve multiple goals, data efficiency is intimately connected with the generalization of the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Zhang-Wei Hong , Ge Yang , Pulkit Agrawal

The recent work by Dong & Yang (2023) showed for misspecified sparse linear bandits, one can obtain an $O\left(\epsilon\right)$-optimal policy using a polynomial number of samples when the sparsity is a constant, where $\epsilon$ is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-19 Ally Yalei Du , Lin F. Yang , Ruosong Wang

In many real world applications, reinforcement learning agents have to optimize multiple objectives while following certain rules or satisfying a list of constraints. Classical methods based on reward shaping, i.e. a weighted combination of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Gabriel Kalweit , Maria Huegle , Moritz Werling , Joschka Boedecker