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We present a new model-based algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) which consists of explicit exploration and exploitation phases, and is applicable in large or infinite state spaces. The algorithm maintains a set of dynamics models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Mikael Henaff

Few-shot meta-learning presents a challenge for gradient descent optimization due to the limited number of training samples per task. To address this issue, we propose an episodic memory optimization for meta-learning, we call EMO, which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Yingjun Du , Jiayi Shen , Xiantong Zhen , Cees G. M. Snoek

We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning in episodic Markov decision processes with unknown transition kernels, where the goal is to optimize the total reward under the risk measure of exponential utility. We propose two provably…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Yingjie Fei , Zhuoran Yang , Yudong Chen , Zhaoran Wang , Qiaomin Xie

Learning dexterous manipulation in high-dimensional state-action spaces is an important open challenge with exploration presenting a major bottleneck. Although in many cases the learning process could be guided by demonstrations or other…

We propose UCBMQ, Upper Confidence Bound Momentum Q-learning, a new algorithm for reinforcement learning in tabular and possibly stage-dependent, episodic Markov decision process. UCBMQ is based on Q-learning where we add a momentum term…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-21 Pierre Menard , Omar Darwiche Domingues , Xuedong Shang , Michal Valko

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has advanced LLM reasoning, applying it to long-context scenarios is hindered by sparsity of outcome rewards. This limitation fails to penalize ungrounded "lucky guesses," leaving the critical process of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Xin Guan , Zijian Li , Shen Huang , Pengjun Xie , Jingren Zhou , Jiuxin Cao

Offline (or batch) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms seek to learn an optimal policy from a fixed dataset without active data collection. Based on the composition of the offline dataset, two main categories of methods are used:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Paria Rashidinejad , Banghua Zhu , Cong Ma , Jiantao Jiao , Stuart Russell

Automating optimization modeling with LLMs is a promising path toward scalable decision intelligence, but existing approaches either rely on agentic pipelines built on closed-source LLMs with high inference latency, or fine-tune smaller…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Runda Guan , Xiangqing Shen , Jiajun Zhang , Yifan Zhang , Jian Cheng , Rui Xia

The effective training of Large Language Models (LLMs) for function calling faces a critical challenge: balancing exploration of complex reasoning paths with stable policy optimization. Standard methods like Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT)…

Distributional reinforcement learning algorithms have attempted to utilize estimated uncertainty for exploration, such as optimism in the face of uncertainty. However, using the estimated variance for optimistic exploration may cause biased…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Taehyun Cho , Seungyub Han , Heesoo Lee , Kyungjae Lee , Jungwoo Lee

Most provably-efficient learning algorithms introduce optimism about poorly-understood states and actions to encourage exploration. We study an alternative approach for efficient exploration, posterior sampling for reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-12-30 Ian Osband , Daniel Russo , Benjamin Van Roy

Classical reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize the expected cumulative reward. In this work, we consider the RL setting where the goal is to optimize the quantile of the cumulative reward. We parameterize the policy controlling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-15 Jinyang Jiang , Jiaqiao Hu , Yijie Peng

We study Online Convex Optimization (OCO) with adversarial constraints, where an online algorithm must make sequential decisions to minimize both convex loss functions and cumulative constraint violations. We focus on a setting where the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-14 Jordan Lekeufack , Michael I. Jordan

It is desirable for policies to optimistically explore new states and behaviors during online reinforcement learning (RL) or fine-tuning, especially when prior offline data does not provide enough state coverage. However, exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Max Sobol Mark , Archit Sharma , Fahim Tajwar , Rafael Rafailov , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

We establish that an optimistic variant of Q-learning applied to a fixed-horizon episodic Markov decision process with an aggregated state representation incurs regret $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{H^5 M K} + \epsilon HK)$, where $H$ is the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-20 Shi Dong , Benjamin Van Roy , Zhengyuan Zhou

Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is the predominant algorithm for training text generation models. This paradigm relies on direct supervision examples, which is not applicable to many emerging applications, such as generating adversarial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Han Guo , Bowen Tan , Zhengzhong Liu , Eric P. Xing , Zhiting Hu

Offline reinforcement learning seeks to derive improved policies entirely from historical data but often struggles with over-optimistic value estimates for out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. This issue is typically mitigated via policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Wenhui Liu , Zhijian Wu , Jingchao Wang , Dingjiang Huang , Shuigeng Zhou

We study offline reinforcement learning (RL) which seeks to learn a good policy based on a fixed, pre-collected dataset. A fundamental challenge behind this task is the distributional shift due to the dataset lacking sufficient exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Wenzhuo Zhou

Contextual combinatorial optimization (CCO) plays a critical role in decision-making under uncertainty, yet remains a significant challenge. We present Quantum End-to-End Learning (QEL), the first quantum computing-based end-to-end learning…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-21 Jaehwan Lee , Changhyun Kwon

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to learn optimal policies from static datasets without further environment interaction. A key challenge is the distribution shift between the learned and behavior policies, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Haohui Chen , Zhiyong Chen