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The recently proposed distributional approach to reinforcement learning (DiRL) is centered on learning the distribution of the reward-to-go, often referred to as the value distribution. In this work, we show that the distributional Bellman…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-07 Dror Freirich , Ron Meir , Aviv Tamar

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 consider the exploration-exploitation dilemma in finite-horizon reinforcement learning (RL). When the state space is large or continuous, traditional tabular approaches are unfeasible and some form of function approximation is mandatory.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-11 Andrea Zanette , David Brandfonbrener , Emma Brunskill , Matteo Pirotta , Alessandro Lazaric

This paper proposes a computationally tractable algorithm for learning infinite-horizon average-reward linear mixture Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the Bellman optimality condition. Our algorithm for linear mixture MDPs achieves a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Woojin Chae , Kihyuk Hong , Yufan Zhang , Ambuj Tewari , Dabeen Lee

Online reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely applied in information processing scenarios, which usually exhibit much uncertainty due to the intrinsic randomness of channels and service demands. In this paper, we consider an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-17 Rongpeng Li

Learning Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the presence of the adversary is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we study RL in episodic MDPs with adversarial reward and full information feedback, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-21 Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

In performative prediction, the deployment of a predictive model triggers a shift in the data distribution. As these shifts are typically unknown ahead of time, the learner needs to deploy a model to get feedback about the distribution it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Meena Jagadeesan , Tijana Zrnic , Celestine Mendler-Dünner

We study algorithms using randomized value functions for exploration in reinforcement learning. This type of algorithms enjoys appealing empirical performance. We show that when we use 1) a single random seed in each episode, and 2) a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Zhihan Xiong , Ruoqi Shen , Qiwen Cui , Maryam Fazel , Simon S. Du

While most reinforcement learning methods today flatten the distribution of future returns to a single scalar value, distributional RL methods exploit the return distribution to provide stronger learning signals and to enable applications…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Perry Dong , Chongyi Zheng , Chelsea Finn , Dorsa Sadigh , Benjamin Eysenbach

We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning. In this problem, a group of agents works cooperatively to evaluate the value function for the global discounted accumulative reward problem, which is composed of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-04 Thinh T. Doan , Siva Theja Maguluri , Justin Romberg

Motivated by engineering applications such as resource allocation in networks and inventory systems, we consider average-reward Reinforcement Learning with unbounded state space and reward function. Recent works studied this problem in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Shaan Ul Haque , Siva Theja Maguluri

Value-function approximation methods that operate in batch mode have foundational importance to reinforcement learning (RL). Finite sample guarantees for these methods often crucially rely on two types of assumptions: (1) mild distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-02 Jinglin Chen , Nan Jiang

We study the problem of deployment efficient reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation under the \emph{reward-free} exploration setting. This is a well-motivated problem because deploying new policies is costly in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Dan Qiao , Yu-Xiang Wang

Designing learning algorithms that are resistant to perturbations of the underlying data distribution is a problem of wide practical and theoretical importance. We present a general approach to this problem focusing on unsupervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-22 Andreas Maurer , Daniela A. Parletta , Andrea Paudice , Massimiliano Pontil

While humans and animals learn incrementally during their lifetimes and exploit their experience to solve new tasks, standard deep reinforcement learning methods specialize to solve only one task at a time. As a result, the information they…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Diego Gomez , Nicanor Quijano , Luis Felipe Giraldo

We study the reinforcement learning (RL) problem in a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP), where an agent explores the environment to maximize the expected cumulative reward while satisfying a single constraint on the expected total…

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has achieved great empirical success in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preference, and it is of great importance to study the statistical efficiency of RLHF algorithms from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Songtao Feng , Jie Fu

Reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation has received increasing attention recently. However, existing work has focused on obtaining $\sqrt{T}$-type regret bound, where $T$ is the number of interactions with the MDP.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-19 Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

The exploration-exploitation trade-off is among the central challenges of reinforcement learning. The optimal Bayesian solution is intractable in general. This paper studies to what extent analytic statements about optimal learning are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-03-13 Philipp Hennig

Three major challenges in reinforcement learning are the complex dynamical systems with large state spaces, the costly data acquisition processes, and the deviation of real-world dynamics from the training environment deployment. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Shyam Sundhar Ramesh , Pier Giuseppe Sessa , Yifan Hu , Andreas Krause , Ilija Bogunovic