Related papers: Asymptotic Analysis of Sample-averaged Q-learning

Recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms making use of Kullback-Leibler (KL) regularization as a core component have shown outstanding performance. Yet, only little is understood theoretically about why KL regularization helps, so far.…

Reinforcement learning algorithms are typically designed for discrete-time dynamics, even though the underlying real-world control systems are often continuous in time. In this paper, we study the problem of continuous-time reinforcement…

Meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) facilitates rapid adaptation to unseen tasks but faces challenges in long-horizon environments. Skill-based approaches tackle this by decomposing state-action sequences into reusable skills and…

We develop provably safe and convergent reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for control of nonlinear dynamical systems, bridging the gap between the hard safety guarantees of control theory and the convergence guarantees of RL theory.…

With the rapid advance of information technology, network systems have become increasingly complex and hence the underlying system dynamics are often unknown or difficult to characterize. Finding a good network control policy is of…

This paper develops a novel control-theoretic framework to analyze the non-asymptotic convergence of Q-learning. We show that the dynamics of asynchronous Q-learning with a constant step-size can be naturally formulated as a discrete-time…

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods with a high replay ratio (RR) and regularization have gained interest due to their superior sample efficiency. However, these methods have mainly been developed for dense-reward tasks. In this paper, we…

Reinforcement learning (RL) with limited samples is common in real-world applications. However, offline RL performance under this constraint is often suboptimal. We consider an alternative approach to dealing with limited samples by…

Benchmarking and establishing proper statistical validation metrics for reinforcement learning (RL) remain ongoing challenges, where no consensus has been established yet. The emergence of quantum computing and its potential applications in…

The reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) can be unleashed with reinforcement learning (RL) (OpenAI, 2024; DeepSeek-AI et al., 2025a; Zeng et al., 2025). The success of existing RL attempts in LLMs usually rely on high-quality…

Reinforcement learning (RL) combines a control problem with statistical estimation: The system dynamics are not known to the agent, but can be learned through experience. A recent line of research casts `RL as inference' and suggests a…

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown stunning results in complex tasks, yet they often operate in isolation, failing to learn from past experiences. Existing memory-based methods primarily store raw trajectories, which are often…

In modern biomedical and econometric studies, longitudinal processes are often characterized by complex time-varying associations and abrupt regime shifts that are shared across correlated outcomes. Standard functional data analysis (FDA)…

In recent years, $Q$-learning has become indispensable for model-free reinforcement learning (MFRL). However, it suffers from well-known problems such as under- and overestimation bias of the value, which may adversely affect the policy…

The problem of sample complexity of online reinforcement learning is often studied in the literature without taking into account any partial knowledge about the system dynamics that could potentially accelerate the learning process. In this…

This paper proposes a novel approach for Asset-Liability Management (ALM) by employing continuous-time Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a linear-quadratic (LQ) formulation that incorporates both interim and terminal objectives. We develop a…

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) seeks reward-maximizing policies from static datasets under strict safety constraints. Existing methods often rely on soft expected-cost objectives or iterative generative inference, which can be…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy learning from fixed datasets without further environment interaction, making it particularly valuable in high-risk or costly domains. Extreme $Q$-Learning (XQL) is a recent offline RL…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise in various robotics applications, yet its deployment on real systems is still limited due to safety and operational constraints. The safe RL field has gained considerable attention in recent…

Dialogue policy learning based on reinforcement learning is difficult to be applied to real users to train dialogue agents from scratch because of the high cost. User simulators, which choose random user goals for the dialogue agent to…