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The goal of robust reinforcement learning (RL) is to learn a policy that is robust against the uncertainty in model parameters. Parameter uncertainty commonly occurs in many real-world RL applications due to simulator modeling errors,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Kishan Panaganti , Zaiyan Xu , Dileep Kalathil , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

This paper addresses the problem of learning optimal policies for satisfying signal temporal logic (STL) specifications by agents with unknown stochastic dynamics. The system is modeled as a Markov decision process, in which the states…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2016-09-26 Derya Aksaray , Austin Jones , Zhaodan Kong , Mac Schwager , Calin Belta

Greedy-GQ with linear function approximation, originally proposed in \cite{maei2010toward}, is a value-based off-policy algorithm for optimal control in reinforcement learning, and it has a non-linear two timescale structure with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Yue Wang , Yi Zhou , Shaofeng Zou

We study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) satisfying \emph{linear Bellman completeness} -- a fundamental setting where the Bellman backup of any linear value function remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Zakaria Mhammedi , Alexander Rakhlin , Nneka Okolo

Q-learning is one of the most popular methods in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Transfer Learning aims to utilize the learned knowledge from source tasks to help new tasks to improve the sample complexity of the new tasks. Considering that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Yue Wang , Qi Meng , Wei Cheng , Yuting Liug , Zhi-Ming Ma , Tie-Yan Liu

When function approximation is used, solving the Bellman optimality equation with stability guarantees has remained a major open problem in reinforcement learning for decades. The fundamental difficulty is that the Bellman operator may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-07 Bo Dai , Albert Shaw , Lihong Li , Lin Xiao , Niao He , Zhen Liu , Jianshu Chen , Le Song

Q-learning is a stochastic approximation version of the classic value iteration. The literature has established that Q-learning suffers from both maximization bias and slower convergence. Recently, multi-step algorithms have shown practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Antony Vijesh , Shreyas S R

Due to the nature of risk management in learning applicable policies, risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RSRL) has been realized as an important direction. RSRL is usually achieved by learning risk-sensitive objectives characterized by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Ruiwen Zhou , Minghuan Liu , Kan Ren , Xufang Luo , Weinan Zhang , Dongsheng Li

We consider Markov Decision Problems defined over continuous state and action spaces, where an autonomous agent seeks to learn a map from its states to actions so as to maximize its long-term discounted accumulation of rewards. We address…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-23 Alec Koppel , Ekaterina Tolstaya , Ethan Stump , Alejandro Ribeiro

The linear programming (LP) approach has a long history in the theory of approximate dynamic programming. When it comes to computation, however, the LP approach often suffers from poor scalability. In this work, we introduce a relaxed…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-12-01 Andrea Martinelli , Matilde Gargiani , John Lygeros

This paper studies the robustness of reinforcement learning algorithms to errors in the learning process. Specifically, we revisit the benchmark problem of discrete-time linear quadratic regulation (LQR) and study the long-standing open…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-16 Bo Pang , Zhong-Ping Jiang

This work presents the first finite-time analysis for the last-iterate convergence of average-reward $Q$-learning with an asynchronous implementation. A key feature of the algorithm we study is the use of adaptive stepsizes, which serve as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Zaiwei Chen , Phalguni Nanda

The exploration-exploitation dilemma has been a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) with complex model classes. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, Monotonic Q-Learning with Upper Confidence Bound (MQL-UCB) for RL with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Heyang Zhao , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

In this paper, we study the finite-sample statistical rates of distributional temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation. The purpose of distributional TD learning is to estimate the return distribution of a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Kaicheng Jin , Yang Peng , Jiansheng Yang , Zhihua Zhang

Q-learning is a popular Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm which is widely used in practice with function approximation (Mnih et al., 2015). In contrast, existing theoretical results are pessimistic about Q-learning. For example, (Baird,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Naman Agarwal , Syomantak Chaudhuri , Prateek Jain , Dheeraj Nagaraj , Praneeth Netrapalli

In many real world applications, reinforcement learning agents have to optimize multiple objectives while following certain rules or satisfying a list of constraints. Classical methods based on reward shaping, i.e. a weighted combination of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Gabriel Kalweit , Maria Huegle , Moritz Werling , Joschka Boedecker

This paper presents a one-shot learning approach with performance and robustness guarantees for the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) control of stochastic linear systems. Even though data-based LQR control has been widely considered,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-10-29 Ramin Esmzad , Hamidreza Modares

In spite of the large literature on reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), a complete theoretical understanding is still lacking. In a partially observable setting, the history of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Erfan Seyedsalehi , Nima Akbarzadeh , Amit Sinha , Aditya Mahajan

This paper develops a quantized Q-learning algorithm for the optimal control of controlled diffusion processes on $\mathbb{R}^d$ under both discounted and ergodic (average) cost criteria. We first establish near-optimality of finite-state…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-16 Erhan Bayraktar , Ali D. Kara , Somnath Pradhan , Serdar Yuksel

Reinforcement learning algorithms solve sequential decision-making problems in probabilistic environments by optimizing for long-term reward. The desire to use reinforcement learning in safety-critical settings inspires a recent line of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-12-17 Koundinya Vajjha , Avraham Shinnar , Vasily Pestun , Barry Trager , Nathan Fulton