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Online Reinforcement Learning (RL) is typically framed as the process of minimizing cumulative regret (CR) through interactions with an unknown environment. However, real-world RL applications usually involve a sequence of tasks, and the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-28 Ziping Xu , Kelly W. Zhang , Susan A. Murphy

To obtain a near-optimal policy with fewer interactions in Reinforcement Learning (RL), a promising approach involves the combination of offline RL, which enhances sample efficiency by leveraging offline datasets, and online RL, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-18 Xiaoyu Wen , Xudong Yu , Rui Yang , Haoyuan Chen , Chenjia Bai , Zhen Wang

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

In this work, we study model-based reinforcement learning (RL) in unknown stabilizable linear dynamical systems. When learning a dynamical system, one needs to stabilize the unknown dynamics in order to avoid system blow-ups. We propose an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-06 Sahin Lale , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Babak Hassibi , Anima Anandkumar

Meta reinforcement learning (RL) allows agents to leverage experience across a distribution of tasks on which the agent can train at will, enabling faster learning of optimal policies on new test tasks. Despite its success in improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Tingting Ni , Maryam Kamgarpour

In some reinforcement learning problems an agent may be provided with a set of input policies, perhaps learned from prior experience or provided by advisors. We present a reinforcement learning with policy advice (RLPA) algorithm which…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-07-19 Mohammad Gheshlaghi Azar , Alessandro Lazaric , Emma Brunskill

We consider offline reinforcement learning (RL) in $H$-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the linear $q^\pi$-realizability assumption, where the action-value function of every policy is linear with respect to a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Volodymyr Tkachuk , Gellért Weisz , Csaba Szepesvári

Decision-making under distribution shift is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment environments differ. We study this problem through the lens of robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Jingwen Gu , Yiting He , Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in real-world decision-making across diverse domains, including gaming, robotics, online advertising, public health, and natural language processing. Despite these advances, a…

Applications · Statistics 2026-01-23 Asim H. Gazi , Yongyi Guo , Daiqi Gao , Ziping Xu , Kelly W. Zhang , Susan A. Murphy

Two central paradigms have emerged in the reinforcement learning (RL) community: online RL and offline RL. In the online RL setting, the agent has no prior knowledge of the environment, and must interact with it in order to find an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Andrew Wagenmaker , Aldo Pacchiano

Low-complexity models such as linear function representation play a pivotal role in enabling sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL). The current paper pertains to a scenario with value-based linear representation, which postulates the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Gen Li , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi , Yuantao Gu , Yuting Wei

A promising paradigm for offline reinforcement learning (RL) is to constrain the learned policy to stay close to the dataset behaviors, known as policy constraint offline RL. However, existing works heavily rely on the purity of the data,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Chengqian Gao , Ke Xu , Liu Liu , Deheng Ye , Peilin Zhao , Zhiqiang Xu

We study offline reinforcement learning in average-reward MDPs, which presents increased challenges from the perspectives of distribution shift and non-uniform coverage, and has been relatively underexamined from a theoretical perspective.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Matthew Zurek , Guy Zamir , Yudong Chen

This paper targets the efficient construction of a safety shield for decision making in scenarios that incorporate uncertainty. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are prominent models to capture such planning problems. Reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Nils Jansen , Bettina Könighofer , Sebastian Junges , Alexandru C. Serban , Roderick Bloem

Reinforcement learning (RL) under changing environment models many real-world applications via nonstationary Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), and hence gains considerable interest. However, theoretical studies on nonstationary MDPs in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-11 Yuan Cheng , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

Recent studies have shown that episodic reinforcement learning (RL) is not more difficult than contextual bandits, even with a long planning horizon and unknown state transitions. However, these results are limited to either tabular Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

This paper offers a new hybrid probably approximately correct (PAC) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for Markov decision processes (MDPs) that intelligently maintains favorable features of its parents. The designed algorithm, referred…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Ashkan Zehfroosh , Herbert G. Tanner

In online reinforcement learning (RL), instead of employing standard structural assumptions on Markov decision processes (MDPs), using a certain coverage condition (original from offline RL) is enough to ensure sample-efficient guarantees…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-01 Fanghui Liu , Luca Viano , Volkan Cevher

We provide the first sub-linear space and sub-linear regret algorithm for online learning with expert advice (against an oblivious adversary), addressing an open question raised recently by Srinivas, Woodruff, Xu and Zhou (STOC 2022). We…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-11-09 Binghui Peng , Fred Zhang

Horizon reduction is a common design strategy in offline reinforcement learning (RL), used to mitigate long-horizon credit assignment, improve stability, and enable scalable learning through truncated rollouts, windowed training, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Uday Kumar Nidadala , Venkata Bhumika Guthi