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Related papers: Bootstrapping Expectiles in Reinforcement Learning

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We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL), a crucial field due to its ability to enhance decision-making in scenarios where it is essential to manage uncertainty and minimize potential adverse outcomes. Particularly, our work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Dake Zhang , Boxiang Lyu , Shuang Qiu , Mladen Kolar , Tong Zhang

Impressive results in natural language processing (NLP) based on the Transformer neural network architecture have inspired researchers to explore viewing offline reinforcement learning (RL) as a generic sequence modeling problem. Recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-22 Adam Villaflor , Zhe Huang , Swapnil Pande , John Dolan , Jeff Schneider

In reinforcement learning (RL), temporal difference (TD) error is known to be related to the firing rate of dopamine neurons. It has been observed that each dopamine neuron does not behave uniformly, but each responds to the TD error in an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Taisuke Kobayashi

The use of pessimism, when reasoning about datasets lacking exhaustive exploration has recently gained prominence in offline reinforcement learning. Despite the robustness it adds to the algorithm, overly pessimistic reasoning can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Tengyang Xie , Ching-An Cheng , Nan Jiang , Paul Mineiro , Alekh Agarwal

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown significant promise for sequential portfolio optimization tasks, such as stock trading, where the objective is to maximize cumulative returns while minimizing risks using historical data. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Haochen Yuan , Minting Pan , Yunbo Wang , Siyu Gao , Philip S. Yu , Xiaokang Yang

The last decade has seen an upswing in interest and adoption of reinforcement learning (RL) techniques, in large part due to its demonstrated capabilities at performing certain tasks at "super-human levels". This has incentivized the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Pablo Samuel Castro

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) -- the problem of learning reward functions from demonstrations of an \emph{expert policy} -- plays a critical role in developing intelligent systems. While widely used in applications, theoretical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-13 Lei Zhao , Mengdi Wang , Yu Bai

The goal of the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem is to recover the reward functions from expert demonstrations. However, the IRL problem like any ill-posed inverse problem suffers the congenital defect that the policy may be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-26 Ce Ju

Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) assumes the agents make decisions based on Markov decision processes (MDPs) with one-step transition models. In many real-world applications, such as energy management and stock investment, agents can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Chenbei Lu , Zaiwei Chen , Tongxin Li , Chenye Wu , Adam Wierman

Off-policy deep reinforcement learning algorithms commonly compensate for overestimation bias during temporal-difference learning by utilizing pessimistic estimates of the expected target returns. In this work, we propose Generalized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Edoardo Cetin , Oya Celiktutan

We present a novel observation about the behavior of offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms: on many benchmark datasets, offline RL can produce well-performing and safe policies even when trained with "wrong" reward labels, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Anqi Li , Dipendra Misra , Andrey Kolobov , Ching-An Cheng

In this work, we address the problem of determining reliable policies in reinforcement learning (RL), with a focus on optimization under uncertainty and the need for performance guarantees. While classical RL algorithms aim at maximizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Nadir Farhi

Most provably-efficient learning algorithms introduce optimism about poorly-understood states and actions to encourage exploration. We study an alternative approach for efficient exploration, posterior sampling for reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-12-30 Ian Osband , Daniel Russo , Benjamin Van Roy

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved state-of-the-art results in domains such as robotics and games. We build on this previous work by applying RL algorithms to a selection of canonical online stochastic optimization problems with a…

We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Nadav Merlis

In recent years, deep off-policy actor-critic algorithms have become a dominant approach to reinforcement learning for continuous control. One of the primary drivers of this improved performance is the use of pessimistic value updates to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-07 Ted Moskovitz , Jack Parker-Holder , Aldo Pacchiano , Michael Arbel , Michael I. Jordan

Batch reinforcement learning (RL) is important to apply RL algorithms to many high stakes tasks. Doing batch RL in a way that yields a reliable new policy in large domains is challenging: a new decision policy may visit states and actions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-23 Yao Liu , Adith Swaminathan , Alekh Agarwal , Emma Brunskill

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a control approach that can handle nonlinear stochastic optimal control problems. However, despite the promise exhibited, RL has yet to see marked translation to industrial practice primarily due to its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-15 Elton Pan , Panagiotis Petsagkourakis , Max Mowbray , Dongda Zhang , Antonio del Rio-Chanona

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover the reward function of an expert agent from demonstrations of behavior. It is well-known that the IRL problem is fundamentally ill-posed, i.e., many reward functions can explain the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Filippo Lazzati , Mirco Mutti , Alberto Maria Metelli

The gloabal objective of inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is to estimate the unknown cost function of some MDP base on observed trajectories generated by (approximate) optimal policies. The classical approach consists in tuning this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-26 Firas Jarboui , Vianney Perchet