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Related papers: EVAL: EigenVector-based Average-reward Learning

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This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-17 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Dale Schuurmans

We study the problem of generalizing an expert agent's behavior, provided through demonstrations, to new environments and/or additional constraints. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) offers a promising solution by seeking to recover the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Filippo Lazzati , Alberto Maria Metelli

Learning a predictive model of the mean return, or value function, plays a critical role in many reinforcement learning algorithms. Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has been shown to improve performance by modeling the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Ju-Seung Byun , Andrew Perrault

Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has had incredible achievements on high dimensional problems, yet its learning process remains unstable even on the simplest tasks. Deep RL uses neural networks as function approximators. These neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Riccardo Della Vecchia , Alena Shilova , Philippe Preux , Riad Akrour

The goal of the Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) task is to identify the underlying reward function and the corresponding optimal policy from a set of expert demonstrations. While most IRL algorithms' theoretical guarantees rely on a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-25 Ruijia Zhang , Siliang Zeng , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

Option-critic learning is a general-purpose reinforcement learning (RL) framework that aims to address the issue of long term credit assignment by leveraging temporal abstractions. However, when dealing with extended timescales, discounting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Akshay Dharmavaram , Matthew Riemer , Shalabh Bhatnagar

The analysis of Temporal Difference (TD) learning in the average-reward setting faces notable theoretical difficulties because the Bellman operator is not contractive with respect to any norm. This complicates standard analyses of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Haoxing Tian , Zaiwei Chen , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Alex Olshevsky

Envisioned application areas for reinforcement learning (RL) include autonomous driving, precision agriculture, and finance, which all require RL agents to make decisions in the real world. A significant challenge hindering the adoption of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-20 Dominik Baumann , Erfaun Noorani , James Price , Ole Peters , Colm Connaughton , Thomas B. Schön

The effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in continuous control robotics tasks is mainly dependent on the design of the underlying reward function, which is highly prone to reward hacking. A misalignment between the reward…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in performing complex multi-step reasoning, yet they continue to struggle with mathematical reasoning, often making systematic errors. A promising solution is reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Hanning Zhang , Pengcheng Wang , Shizhe Diao , Yong Lin , Rui Pan , Hanze Dong , Dylan Zhang , Pavlo Molchanov , Tong Zhang

We consider off-policy policy evaluation with function approximation (FA) in average-reward MDPs, where the goal is to estimate both the reward rate and the differential value function. For this problem, bootstrapping is necessary and,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Shangtong Zhang , Yi Wan , Richard S. Sutton , Shimon Whiteson

Commonly in reinforcement learning (RL), rewards are discounted over time using an exponential function to model time preference, thereby bounding the expected long-term reward. In contrast, in economics and psychology, it has been shown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-08 Matthias Schultheis , Constantin A. Rothkopf , Heinz Koeppl

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), agents have no incentive to exhibit predictable behaviors, and are often pushed (through e.g. policy entropy regularisation) to randomise their actions in favor of exploration. This often makes it challenging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Daniel Jarne Ornia , Giannis Delimpaltadakis , Jens Kober , Javier Alonso-Mora

There has been significant progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) in recent years. Nevertheless, finding suitable hyperparameter configurations and reward functions remains challenging even for experts, and performance heavily relies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Julian Dierkes , Emma Cramer , Holger H. Hoos , Sebastian Trimpe

Reinforcement learning utilizing kernel ridge regression to predict the expected value function represents a powerful method with great representational capacity. This setting is a highly versatile framework amenable to analytical results.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Sattar Vakili , Julia Olkhovskaya

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been used to learn effective heuristics for solving complex combinatorial optimisation problem via policy networks and have demonstrated promising performance. Existing works have focused on solving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Nasrin Sultana , Jeffrey Chan , A. K. Qin , Tabinda Sarwar

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Kianté Brantley , Hal Daumé , Miroslav Dudik , Robert Schapire

Reinforcement learning is important part of artificial intelligence. In this paper, we review model-free reinforcement learning that utilizes the average reward optimality criterion in the infinite horizon setting. Motivated by the solo…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-04 Vektor Dewanto , George Dunn , Ali Eshragh , Marcus Gallagher , Fred Roosta

Single-task RL agents are typically trained under a fixed reward function, which limits their robustness to reward misspecification and their ability to adapt to changing preferences. We introduce Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan , Pieter Abbeel

Given a dataset of expert demonstrations, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover a reward for which the expert is optimal. This work proposes a model-free algorithm to solve entropy-regularized IRL problem. In particular, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Titouan Renard , Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Tingting Ni , Maryam Kamgarpour