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Related papers: Robust Q-Learning under Corrupted Rewards

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Q-learning is a regression-based approach that is widely used to formalize the development of an optimal dynamic treatment strategy. Finite dimensional working models are typically used to estimate certain nuisance parameters, and…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-03-30 Ashkan Ertefaie , James R. McKay , David Oslin , Robert L. Strawderman

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, such as Q-learning, directly parameterize and update value functions or policies without explicitly modeling the environment. They are typically simpler, more flexible to use, and thus more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Chi Jin , Zeyuan Allen-Zhu , Sebastien Bubeck , Michael I. Jordan

Many real-world control problems, ranging from finance to robotics, evolve in continuous time with non-uniform, event-driven decisions. Standard discrete-time reinforcement learning (RL), based on fixed-step Bellman updates, struggles in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Minh Nguyen

Machine unlearning poses the challenge of ``how to eliminate the influence of specific data from a pretrained model'' in regard to privacy concerns. While prior research on approximated unlearning has demonstrated accuracy and efficiency in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Khoa Tran , Simon S. Woo

The optimistic nature of the Q-learning target leads to an overestimation bias, which is an inherent problem associated with standard $Q-$learning. Such a bias fails to account for the possibility of low returns, particularly in risky…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-05 Thommen George Karimpanal , Hung Le , Majid Abdolshah , Santu Rana , Sunil Gupta , Truyen Tran , Svetha Venkatesh

We present an optimistic Q-learning algorithm for regret minimization in average reward reinforcement learning under an additional assumption on the underlying MDP that for all policies, the time to visit some frequent state $s_0$ is finite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Priyank Agrawal , Shipra Agrawal

The objective in this paper is to obtain fast converging reinforcement learning algorithms to approximate solutions to the problem of discounted cost optimal stopping in an irreducible, uniformly ergodic Markov chain, evolving on a compact…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-10-01 Shuhang Chen , Adithya M. Devraj , Ana Bušić , Sean P. Meyn

Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) models are vulnerable in various noisy scenarios. For instance, the observed reward channel is often subject to noise in practice (e.g., when rewards are collected through sensors),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-04 Jingkang Wang , Yang Liu , Bo Li

We study reinforcement learning under model misspecification, where we do not have access to the true environment but only to a reasonably close approximation to it. We address this problem by extending the framework of robust MDPs to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-10 Aurko Roy , Huan Xu , Sebastian Pokutta

Soft Q-learning is a variation of Q-learning designed to solve entropy regularized Markov decision problems where an agent aims to maximize the entropy regularized value function. Despite its empirical success, there have been limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Narim Jeong , Donghwan Lee

Establishing robust policies is essential to counter attacks or disturbances affecting deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents. Recent studies explore state-adversarial robustness and suggest the potential lack of an optimal robust policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Haoran Li , Zicheng Zhang , Wang Luo , Congying Han , Yudong Hu , Tiande Guo , Shichen Liao

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

We study the problem of robust reinforcement learning under adversarial corruption on both rewards and transitions. Our attack model assumes an \textit{adaptive} adversary who can arbitrarily corrupt the reward and transition at every step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Xuezhou Zhang , Yiding Chen , Xiaojin Zhu , Wen Sun

No real-world reward function is perfect. Sensory errors and software bugs may result in RL agents observing higher (or lower) rewards than they should. For example, a reinforcement learning agent may prefer states where a sensory error…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-08-22 Tom Everitt , Victoria Krakovna , Laurent Orseau , Marcus Hutter , Shane Legg

Sample complexity bounds are a common performance metric in the Reinforcement Learning literature. In the discounted cost, infinite horizon setting, all of the known bounds have a factor that is a polynomial in $1/(1-\gamma)$, where $\gamma…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-09 Adithya M. Devraj , Sean P. Meyn

Reinforcement learning has witnessed significant advancements, particularly with the emergence of model-based approaches. Among these, $Q$-learning has proven to be a powerful algorithm in model-free settings. However, the extension of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Han-Dong Lim , HyeAnn Lee , Donghwan Lee

The use of target networks in deep reinforcement learning is a widely popular solution to mitigate the brittleness of semi-gradient approaches and stabilize learning. However, target networks notoriously require additional memory and delay…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Théo Vincent , Yogesh Tripathi , Tim Faust , Abdullah Akgül , Yaniv Oren , Melih Kandemir , Jan Peters , Carlo D'Eramo

We consider the sequential optimization of an unknown, continuous, and expensive to evaluate reward function, from noisy and adversarially corrupted observed rewards. When the corruption attacks are subject to a suitable budget $C$ and the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-30 Ilija Bogunovic , Zihan Li , Andreas Krause , Jonathan Scarlett

It is well known that the extension of Watkins' algorithm to general function approximation settings is challenging: does the projected Bellman equation have a solution? If so, is the solution useful in the sense of generating a good…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-08-11 Prashant G. Mehta , Sean P. Meyn

The interplay between exploration and exploitation in competitive multi-agent learning is still far from being well understood. Motivated by this, we study smooth Q-learning, a prototypical learning model that explicitly captures the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Stefanos Leonardos , Georgios Piliouras , Kelly Spendlove