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In this study, we consider the application of max-plus-linear approximators for Q-function in offline reinforcement learning of discounted Markov decision processes. In particular, we incorporate these approximators to propose novel fitted…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-11 Y. Liu , M. A. S. Kolarijani

We investigate the problem of learning linear quadratic regulators (LQR) in a multi-task, heterogeneous, and model-free setting. We characterize the stability and personalization guarantees of a policy gradient-based (PG) model-agnostic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-04 Leonardo F. Toso , Donglin Zhan , James Anderson , Han Wang

The goal of this paper is to investigate new and simple convergence analysis of dynamic programming for linear quadratic regulator problem of discrete-time linear time-invariant systems. In particular, bounds on errors are given in terms of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-18 Donghwan Lee

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for a class of continuous-time linear-quadratic (LQ) control problems for diffusions, where states are scalar-valued and running control rewards are absent but volatilities of the state processes depend…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Yilie Huang , Yanwei Jia , Xun Yu Zhou

We study two time-scale linear stochastic approximation algorithms, which can be used to model well-known reinforcement learning algorithms such as GTD, GTD2, and TDC. We present finite-time performance bounds for the case where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Harsh Gupta , R. Srikant , Lei Ying

In a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP), the objective is to find the optimal value function, i.e., the value function corresponding to an optimal policy. This problem reduces to solving a functional equation known as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-17 Chandramouli Kamanchi , Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Deep Q-learning algorithms remain notoriously unstable, especially during early training when the maximization operator amplifies estimation errors. Inspired by bounded rationality theory and developmental learning, we introduce Sat-EnQ, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Ünver Çiftçi

Optimal control theory and machine learning techniques are combined to formulate and solve in closed form an optimal control formulation of online learning from supervised examples with regularization of the updates. The connections with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-12-15 Giorgio Gnecco , Alberto Bemporad , Marco Gori , Marcello Sanguineti

In learning-to-learn the goal is to infer a learning algorithm that works well on a class of tasks sampled from an unknown meta distribution. In contrast to previous work on batch learning-to-learn, we consider a scenario where tasks are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-23 Giulia Denevi , Carlo Ciliberto , Dimitris Stamos , Massimiliano Pontil

We explore reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal policy in the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem. In particular, we consider the convergence of policy gradient methods in the setting of known and unknown parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Ben Hambly , Renyuan Xu , Huining Yang

We study offline reinforcement learning under $Q^\star$-approximation and partial coverage, a setting that motivates practical algorithms such as Conservative $Q$-Learning (CQL; Kumar et al., 2020) but has received limited theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Haolin Liu , Braham Snyder , Chen-Yu Wei

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

Various algorithms in reinforcement learning exhibit dramatic variability in their convergence rates and ultimate accuracy as a function of the problem structure. Such instance-specific behavior is not captured by existing global minimax…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-29 Koulik Khamaru , Eric Xia , Martin J. Wainwright , Michael I. Jordan

In deep learning tasks, the learning rate determines the update step size in each iteration, which plays a critical role in gradient-based optimization. However, the determination of the appropriate learning rate in practice typically…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-04-08 Yingqiu Zhu , Yu Chen , Danyang Huang , Bo Zhang , Hansheng Wang

Off-policy, value-based reinforcement learning methods such as Q-learning are appealing because they can learn from arbitrary experience, including data collected by older policies or other agents. In practice, however, bootstrapping makes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Armaan A. Abraham , Lucy Xiaoyang Shi , Chelsea Finn

We study reinforcement learning with linear function approximation and finite-memory approximations for partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs). We first present an algorithm for the value evaluation of finite-memory feedback…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-22 Ali Devran Kara

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

Policy evaluation in reinforcement learning is often conducted using two-timescale stochastic approximation, which results in various gradient temporal difference methods such as GTD(0), GTD2, and TDC. Here, we provide convergence rate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-05 Gal Dalal , Balazs Szorenyi , Gugan Thoppe

Multi-layer feedforward networks have been used to approximate a wide range of nonlinear functions. An important and fundamental problem is to understand the learnability of a network model through its statistical risk, or the expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Gen Li , Jie Ding

We analyse quantile temporal-difference learning (QTD), a distributional reinforcement learning algorithm that has proven to be a key component in several successful large-scale applications of reinforcement learning. Despite these…