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Standard approaches to goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) that rely on temporal-difference learning can be unstable and sample-inefficient due to bootstrapping. While recent work has explored contrastive and supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Franki Nguimatsia Tiofack , Fabian Schramm , Théotime Le Hellard , Justin Carpentier

Multi-agent robust reinforcement learning, also known as multi-player robust Markov games (RMGs), is a crucial framework for modeling competitive interactions under environmental uncertainties, with wide applications in multi-agent systems.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Yuchen Jiao , Gen Li

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of finding a reward function that generates a given optimal policy for a given Markov Decision Process. This paper looks at an algorithmic-independent geometric analysis of the IRL problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-19 Abi Komanduru , Jean Honorio

Several important problem settings within the literature of reinforcement learning (RL), such as meta-learning, hierarchical learning, and RL from human feedback (RL-HF), can be modelled as bilevel RL problems. A lot has been achieved in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Naman Saxena , Vaneet Aggarwal

Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) based machine learning algorithms have suffered from weak generalization performance on data obtained from out-of-distribution (OOD). To address this problem, Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) objective was…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-25 Jun-Hyun Bae , Inchul Choi , Minho Lee

Designing learning agents that explore efficiently in a complex environment has been widely recognized as a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning. While a number of works have demonstrated the effectiveness of techniques based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Yan Chen , Qinxun Bai , Yiteng Zhang , Shi Dong , Maria Dimakopoulou , Qi Sun , Zhengyuan Zhou

This paper studies safe Reinforcement Learning (safe RL) with linear function approximation and under hard instantaneous constraints where unsafe actions must be avoided at each step. Existing studies have considered safe RL with hard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-25 Honghao Wei , Xin Liu , Lei Ying

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) is empirically shown to notably enhance the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), particularly in mathematics and programming. However, the mechanistic role of Sample…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yue Cheng , Jiajun Zhang , Xiaohui Gao , Weiwei Xing , Zheng Wang , Zhanxing Zhu

Achieving sample efficiency in online episodic reinforcement learning (RL) requires optimally balancing exploration and exploitation. When it comes to a finite-horizon episodic Markov decision process with $S$ states, $A$ actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Gen Li , Laixi Shi , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to maximize the return while adhering to predefined constraint limits, which represent domain-specific safety requirements. In continuous control settings, where learning agents govern system…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Somnath Hazra , Pallab Dasgupta , Soumyajit Dey

Policy-based reinforcement learning currently plays an important role in improving LLMs on mathematical reasoning tasks. However, existing rollout-based reinforcement learning methods (GRPO, DAPO, GSPO, etc.) fail to explicitly consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Guochao Jiang , Wenfeng Feng , Guofeng Quan , Chuzhan Hao , Yuewei Zhang , Guohua Liu , Hao Wang

Robust estimators for linear regression require non-convex objective functions to shield against adverse affects of outliers. This non-convexity brings challenges, particularly when combined with penalization in high-dimensional settings.…

Computation · Statistics 2025-08-08 David Kepplinger , Siqi Wei

A fundamental question in the theory of reinforcement learning is: suppose the optimal $Q$-function lies in the linear span of a given $d$ dimensional feature mapping, is sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) possible? The recent and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Yuanhao Wang , Ruosong Wang , Sham M. Kakade

This paper aims to solve a safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem with risk measure-based constraints. As risk measures, such as conditional value at risk (CVaR), focus on the tail distribution of cost signals, constraining risk measures…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-04 Dohyeong Kim , Songhwai Oh

Safety in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key property in both training and execution in many domains such as autonomous driving or finance. In this paper, we formalize it with a constrained RL formulation in the distributional RL setting.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Jianyi Zhang , Paul Weng

We study the sample complexity of approximate policy iteration (PI) for the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR), building on a recent line of work using LQR as a testbed to understand the limits of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Karl Krauth , Stephen Tu , Benjamin Recht

We consider the problem of learning models for risk-sensitive reinforcement learning. We theoretically demonstrate that proper value equivalence, a method of learning models which can be used to plan optimally in the risk-neutral setting,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Tyler Kastner , Murat A. Erdogdu , Amir-massoud Farahmand

The multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem is a ubiquitous decision-making problem that exemplifies the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. Standard formulations exclude risk in decision making. Risk notably complicates the basic reward-maximising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-05 Joel Q. L. Chang , Qiuyu Zhu , Vincent Y. F. Tan

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) can improve the robustness and fairness of learning methods. In this paper, we devise stochastic algorithms for a class of DRO problems including group DRO, subpopulation fairness, and empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Tasuku Soma , Khashayar Gatmiry , Sharut Gupta , Stefanie Jegelka

The current paper studies sample-efficient Reinforcement Learning (RL) in settings where only the optimal value function is assumed to be linearly-realizable. It has recently been understood that, even under this seemingly strong assumption…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Philip Amortila , Nan Jiang , Dhruv Madeka , Dean P. Foster