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Related papers: NeoRL: Efficient Exploration for Nonepisodic RL

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This work theoretically studies a ubiquitous reinforcement learning policy for controlling the canonical model of continuous-time stochastic linear-quadratic systems. We show that randomized certainty equivalent policy addresses the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh

This paper derives an optimal control strategy for a simple stochastic dynamical system with constant drift and an additive control input. Motivated by the example of a physical system with an unexpected change in its dynamics, we take the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-09 Daniel Gurevich , Debdipta Goswami , Charles L. Fefferman , Clarence W. Rowley

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn from historical data without requiring (costly) access to the environment. To facilitate offline RL research, we previously introduced NeoRL, which highlighted that datasets from real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Songyi Gao , Zuolin Tu , Rong-Jun Qin , Yi-Hao Sun , Xiong-Hui Chen , Yang Yu

Solving Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) is hard. Learning optimal controllers for POMDPs when the model is unknown is harder. Online learning of optimal controllers for unknown POMDPs, which requires efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Mehdi Jafarnia-Jahromi , Rahul Jain , Ashutosh Nayyar

Many practical applications of online reinforcement learning require the satisfaction of safety constraints while learning about the unknown environment. In this work, we establish theoretical foundations for reinforcement learning with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-30 Benjamin Schiffer , Lucas Janson

This paper brings the concept of ``optimism" to the new and promising framework of online Non-stochastic Control (NSC). Namely, we study how NSC can benefit from a prediction oracle of unknown quality responsible for forecasting future…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Naram Mhaisen , George Iosifidis

We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) based on the entropic risk measure. Although existing works have established non-asymptotic regret guarantees for this problem, they leave open an exponential gap between the upper and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-09 Yingjie Fei , Zhuoran Yang , Yudong Chen , Zhaoran Wang

Robust reinforcement learning (Robust RL) seeks to handle epistemic uncertainty in environment dynamics, but existing approaches often rely on nested min--max optimization, which is computationally expensive and yields overly conservative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Chenliang Li , Junyu Leng , Jiaxiang Li , Youbang Sun , Shixiang Chen , Shahin Shahrampour , Alfredo Garcia

We develop several provably efficient model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We consider both online setting and the setting with access to a simulator. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Zihan Zhang , Qiaomin Xie

Recently, there has been a surge in interest in safe and robust techniques within reinforcement learning (RL). Current notions of risk in RL fail to capture the potential for systemic failures such as abrupt stoppages from system failures…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-10-09 David Mguni

We consider the problem of controlling an unknown linear dynamical system under a stochastic convex cost and full feedback of both the state and cost function. We present a computationally efficient algorithm that attains an optimal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-23 Asaf Cassel , Alon Cohen , Tomer Koren

This work proposes a unified control architecture that couples a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-driven controller with a disturbance-rejection Extended State Observer (ESO), complemented by an Event-Triggered Mechanism (ETM) to limit…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-01 Ningwei Bai , Chi Pui Chan , Qichen Yin , Tengyang Gong , Yunda Yan , Zezhi Tang

What data or environments to use for training to improve downstream performance is a longstanding and very topical question in reinforcement learning. In particular, Unsupervised Environment Design (UED) methods have gained recent attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Alexander Rutherford , Michael Beukman , Timon Willi , Bruno Lacerda , Nick Hawes , Jakob Foerster

This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) for linear systems seeks a cost function whose optimal controller reproduces an expert policy from data. Existing data-driven methods for discrete-time linear systems are largely built on iterative…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-12 Duc Cuong Nguyen , Phuong Nam Dao

We propose a black-box reduction that turns a certain reinforcement learning algorithm with optimal regret in a (near-)stationary environment into another algorithm with optimal dynamic regret in a non-stationary environment, importantly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Chen-Yu Wei , Haipeng Luo

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great empirical success in various application domains. The theoretical aspects of the problem have been extensively studied over past decades, particularly under tabular and linear Markov Decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Sattar Vakili

We study human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (RL) with trajectory preferences, where instead of receiving a numeric reward at each step, the agent only receives preferences over trajectory pairs from a human overseer. The goal of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Xiaoyu Chen , Han Zhong , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Liwei Wang

We investigate robust model-free reinforcement learning algorithms designed for environments that may be dynamic or even adversarial. Traditional state-based policies often struggle to accommodate the challenges imposed by the presence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Udaya Ghai , Arushi Gupta , Wenhan Xia , Karan Singh , Elad Hazan

In many real-world settings, reinforcement learning systems suffer performance degradation when the environment encountered at deployment differs from that observed during training. Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DR-RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Debamita Ghosh , George K. Atia , Yue Wang