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Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms usually require a substantial amount of interaction data and perform well only for specific tasks in a fixed environment. In some scenarios such as healthcare, however, usually only few records are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-17 Chaochao Lu , Biwei Huang , Ke Wang , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato , Kun Zhang , Bernhard Schölkopf

Performance evaluations are critical for quantifying algorithmic advances in reinforcement learning. Recent reproducibility analyses have shown that reported performance results are often inconsistent and difficult to replicate. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-14 Scott M. Jordan , Yash Chandak , Daniel Cohen , Mengxue Zhang , Philip S. Thomas

We devise a control-theoretic reinforcement learning approach to support direct learning of the optimal policy. We establish various theoretical properties of our approach, such as convergence and optimality of our analog of the Bellman…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Weiqin Chen , Mark S. Squillante , Chai Wah Wu , Santiago Paternain

Optimal probabilistic approach in reinforcement learning is computationally infeasible. Its simplification consisting in neglecting difference between true environment and its model estimated using limited number of observations causes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-06-26 Sergey Rodionov , Alexey Potapov , Yurii Vinogradov

A primary requirement for any reinforcement learning method is that it should produce policies that improve upon the initial guess. In this work, we show that the widely used Deep Q-Network (DQN) fails to satisfy this minimal criterion --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Aditya Gopalan , Gugan Thoppe

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

Being able to reason in an environment with a large number of discrete actions is essential to bringing reinforcement learning to a larger class of problems. Recommender systems, industrial plants and language models are only some of the…

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved significant breakthroughs in various tasks. However, most DRL algorithms suffer a problem of generalizing the learned policy which makes the learning performance largely affected even by minor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-11 Zhengyao Jiang , Shan Luo

We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) based on the entropic risk measure. Although existing works have established non-asymptotic regret guarantees for this problem, they leave open an exponential gap between the upper and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-09 Yingjie Fei , Zhuoran Yang , Yudong Chen , Zhaoran Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven its worth in a series of artificial domains, and is beginning to show some successes in real-world scenarios. However, much of the research advances in RL are often hard to leverage in real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-01 Gabriel Dulac-Arnold , Daniel Mankowitz , Todd Hester

This paper surveys the field of reinforcement learning from a computer-science perspective. It is written to be accessible to researchers familiar with machine learning. Both the historical basis of the field and a broad selection of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-11-17 L. P. Kaelbling , M. L. Littman , A. W. Moore

Replication of experimental results has been a challenge faced by many scientific disciplines, including the field of machine learning. Recent work on the theory of machine learning has formalized replicability as the demand that an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Eric Eaton , Marcel Hussing , Michael Kearns , Aaron Roth , Sikata Bela Sengupta , Jessica Sorrell

Reinforcement learning in partially observable environments is typically challenging, as it requires agents to learn an estimate of the underlying system state. These challenges are exacerbated in multi-agent settings, where agents learn…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-14 Paul J. Pritz , Kin K. Leung

Reinforcement learning has been shown to perform a range of complex tasks through interaction with an environment or collected leveraging experience. However, many of these approaches presume optimal or near optimal experiences or the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Chapman Siu , Jason Traish , Richard Yi Da Xu

Most conventional Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms aim to optimize decision-making rules in terms of the expected returns. However, especially for risk management purposes, other risk-sensitive criteria such as the value-at-risk or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-19 Tetsuro Morimura , Masashi Sugiyama , Hisashi Kashima , Hirotaka Hachiya , Toshiyuki Tanaka

Many machine learning approaches are characterized by information constraints on how they interact with the training data. These include memory and sequential access constraints (e.g. fast first-order methods to solve stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-10-29 Ohad Shamir

Reinforcement learning (RL) makes it possible to train agents capable of achieving sophisticated goals in complex and uncertain environments. A key difficulty in reinforcement learning is specifying a reward function for the agent to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-24 Bradly C. Stadie , Pieter Abbeel , Ilya Sutskever

Recent years have witnessed significant progresses in deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). Empowered with large scale neural networks, carefully designed architectures, novel training algorithms and massively parallel computing devices,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-23 Chiyuan Zhang , Oriol Vinyals , Remi Munos , Samy Bengio

We introduce a theorem proving algorithm that uses practically no domain heuristics for guiding its connection-style proof search. Instead, it runs many Monte-Carlo simulations guided by reinforcement learning from previous proof attempts.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-05-22 Cezary Kaliszyk , Josef Urban , Henryk Michalewski , Mirek Olšák

While recent progress has spawned very powerful machine learning systems, those agents remain extremely specialized and fail to transfer the knowledge they gain to similar yet unseen tasks. In this paper, we study a simple reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Remi Tachet , Philip Bachman , Harm van Seijen