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One of the main obstacles to broad application of reinforcement learning methods is the parameter sensitivity of our core learning algorithms. In many large-scale applications, online computation and function approximation represent key…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-10-25 Martha White , Adam White

This paper discusses basic results and recent developments on variational regularization methods, as developed for inverse problems. In a typical setup we review basic properties needed to obtain a convergent regularization scheme and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-10 Martin Burger

In this paper, we propose a generic framework for devising an adaptive approximation scheme for value function approximation in reinforcement learning, which introduces multiscale approximation. The two basic ingredients are multiresolution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-26 Tao Li , Quanyan Zhu

Value-based reinforcement-learning algorithms have shown strong results in games, robotics, and other real-world applications. Overestimation bias is a known threat to those algorithms and can sometimes lead to dramatic performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Martin Waltz , Ostap Okhrin

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) aims to learn from multiple training tasks the ability to adapt efficiently to unseen test tasks. Despite the success, existing meta-RL algorithms are known to be sensitive to the task distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Zichuan Lin , Garrett Thomas , Guangwen Yang , Tengyu Ma

Gradient-based Bi-Level Optimization (BLO) methods have been widely applied to handle modern learning tasks. However, most existing strategies are theoretically designed based on restrictive assumptions (e.g., convexity of the lower-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Risheng Liu , Xuan Liu , Shangzhi Zeng , Jin Zhang , Yixuan Zhang

Long-horizon tasks, which have a large discount factor, pose a challenge for most conventional reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Algorithms such as Value Iteration and Temporal Difference (TD) learning have a slow convergence rate and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Mark Bedaywi , Amin Rakhsha , Amir-massoud Farahmand

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a foundational algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). For nearly forty years, TD learning has served as a workhorse for applied RL as well as a building block for more complex and specialized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Hwanwoo Kim , Panos Toulis , Eric Laber

There has been an increasing surge of interest on development of advanced Reinforcement Learning (RL) systems as intelligent approaches to learn optimal control policies directly from smart agents' interactions with the environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Parvin Malekzadeh , Mohammad Salimibeni , Arash Mohammadi , Akbar Assa , Konstantinos N. Plataniotis

We consider the regret minimization problem in reinforcement learning (RL) in the episodic setting. In many real-world RL environments, the state and action spaces are continuous or very large. Existing approaches establish regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-29 Sayak Ray Chowdhury , Rafael Oliveira

Virtual network embedding (VNE) algorithm is always the key problem in network virtualization (NV) technology. At present, the research in this field still has the following problems. The traditional way to solve VNE problem is to use…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Peiying Zhang , Chao Wang , Chunxiao Jiang , Abderrahim Benslimane

Conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) is a prominent risk measure in financial engineering, energy systems, and supply chain management. In these domains, Markov decision processes (MDPs) with a long-run CVaR criterion effectively mitigate cost…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-11 Qixin Wang , Hao Cao , Jian-Qiang Hu , Mingjie Hu , Li Xia

The quintessential model-based reinforcement-learning agent iteratively refines its estimates or prior beliefs about the true underlying model of the environment. Recent empirical successes in model-based reinforcement learning with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Dilip Arumugam , Benjamin Van Roy

Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) aims to maximize the expected total reward, while the risk of uncertain outcomes needs to be controlled to ensure reliable performance in a risk-averse setting. In this paper, we consider the problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Xian Yu , Siqian Shen

Developing simple, sample-efficient learning algorithms for robust classification is a pressing issue in today's tech-dominated world, and current theoretical techniques requiring exponential sample complexity and complicated improper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Robi Bhattacharjee , Max Hopkins , Akash Kumar , Hantao Yu , Kamalika Chaudhuri

We propose Deep Longitudinal Targeted Minimum Loss-based Estimation (Deep LTMLE), a novel approach to estimate the counterfactual mean of outcome under dynamic treatment policies in longitudinal problem settings. Our approach utilizes a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-09 Toru Shirakawa , Yi Li , Yulun Wu , Sky Qiu , Yuxuan Li , Mingduo Zhao , Hiroyasu Iso , Mark van der Laan

Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising approach for aligning policies with human intent but is often constrained by the high cost of human feedback. In this work, we introduce PrefVLM, a framework that integrates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Udita Ghosh , Dripta S. Raychaudhuri , Jiachen Li , Konstantinos Karydis , Amit Roy-Chowdhury

Reinforcement learning (RL) for exponential-utility optimization in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) lacks principled value-based algorithms. We address this gap in the fixed risk-aversion setting. Building on the Bellman-type…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Gugan Thoppe , L. A. Prashanth , Ankur Naskar , Sanjay Bhat

This work proposes an efficient batch algorithm for feature selection in reinforcement learning (RL) with theoretical convergence guarantees. To mitigate the estimation bias inherent in conventional regularization schemes, the first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Kyohei Suzuki , Konstantinos Slavakis

We propose VL Norm (Variance-reduced Length-dependent Normalization), a simple yet effective loss aggregation method tailored to the characteristic of dynamic generation lengths in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Zhiyuan He , Xufang Luo , Yike Zhang , Yuqing Yang , Lili Qiu