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Reinforcement learning (RL) has exceeded human performance in many synthetic settings such as video games and Go. However, real-world deployment of end-to-end RL models is less common, as RL models can be very sensitive to slight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-29 Jing Dong , Jingwei Li , Baoxiang Wang , Jingzhao Zhang

Actual causality and a closely related concept of responsibility attribution are central to accountable decision making. Actual causality focuses on specific outcomes and aims to identify decisions (actions) that were critical in realizing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-10 Stelios Triantafyllou , Adish Singla , Goran Radanovic

Contextual Markov decision processes (CMDPs) describe a class of reinforcement learning problems in which the transition kernels and reward functions can change over time with different MDPs indexed by a context variable. While CMDPs serve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Junze Deng , Yuan Cheng , Shaofeng Zou , Yingbin Liang

This paper proposes a formal approach to online learning and planning for agents operating in a priori unknown, time-varying environments. The proposed method computes the maximally likely model of the environment, given the observations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Melkior Ornik , Ufuk Topcu

Data-driven approaches to predict-then-optimize decision-making problems seek to mitigate the risk of uncertainty region misspecification in safety-critical settings. Current approaches, however, suffer from considering overly conservative…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-10-17 Yash Patel , Sahana Rayan , Ambuj Tewari

Direct preference optimization (DPO), a widely adopted offline preference optimization algorithm, aims to align large language models (LLMs) with human-desired behaviors using pairwise preference data. However, the generation of the winning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Yuxin Jiang , Bo Huang , Yufei Wang , Xingshan Zeng , Liangyou Li , Yasheng Wang , Xin Jiang , Lifeng Shang , Ruiming Tang , Wei Wang

Many applications -- including power systems, robotics, and economics -- involve a dynamical system interacting with a stochastic and hard-to-model environment. We adopt a reinforcement learning approach to control such systems.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-26 Abed AlRahman Al Makdah , Oliver Kosut , Lalitha Sankar , Shaofeng Zou

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) uses model-free techniques to optimize task-specific control policies. Despite having emerged as a promising approach for complex problems, RL is still hard to use reliably for real-world applications. Apart…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Siddhant Gangapurwala , Alexander Mitchell , Ioannis Havoutis

We study the $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-PAC policy identification problem in finite-horizon episodic Markov Decision Processes. Existing approaches provide finite-time guarantees for approximate settings ($\varepsilon>0$) but suffer from high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Cyrille Kone , Kevin Jamieson

We study the common generalization of Markov decision processes (MDPs) with sets of transition probabilities, known as robust MDPs (RMDPs). A standard goal in RMDPs is to compute a policy that maximizes the expected return under an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Alessandro Abate , Thom Badings , Giuseppe De Giacomo , Francesco Fabiano

Effective exploration remains a central challenge in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL), particularly in high-dimensional continuous control tasks where sample efficiency is crucial. A prominent line of recent work leverages learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Álvaro Serra-Gomez , Daniel Jarne Ornia , Dhruva Tirumala , Thomas Moerland

This paper studies the optimization of Markov decision processes (MDPs) from a risk-seeking perspective, where the risk is measured by conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). The objective is to find a policy that maximizes the long-run CVaR of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-05 Li Xia , Zhihui Yu , Peter W. Glynn

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) typically assigns a uniform, sequence-level advantage to all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Song Yu , Li Li , Wenwen Zhao , Zhisheng Yang

The task adaptation and alignment of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have been significantly advanced by instruction tuning and further strengthened by recent preference optimization. Yet, most LMMs still suffer from severe modality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Chenxi Liu , Tianyi Xiong , Yanshuo Chen , Ruibo Chen , Yihan Wu , Junfeng Guo , Tianyi Zhou , Heng Huang

Standard model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) approaches fit a transition model of the environment to all past experience, but this wastes model capacity on data that is irrelevant for policy improvement. We instead propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Yecheng Jason Ma , Kausik Sivakumar , Jason Yan , Osbert Bastani , Dinesh Jayaraman

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) typically relies on modeling environment dynamics for data efficiency. However, due to the accumulation of model errors over long-horizon rollouts, such methods often face challenges in maintaining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Bin Wang , Boxiang Tao , Haifeng Jing , Hongbo Dou , Zijian Wang

We study model-based learning of finite-window policies in tabular partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). A common approach to learning under partial observability is to approximate unbounded history dependencies using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Philip Jordan , Maryam Kamgarpour

In dynamic programming (DP) and reinforcement learning (RL), an agent learns to act optimally in terms of expected long-term return by sequentially interacting with its environment modeled by a Markov decision process (MDP). More generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Mastane Achab , Gergely Neu

Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) is a promising framework for learning control in a data-efficient manner. MBRL algorithms can be fairly complex due to the separate dynamics modeling and the subsequent planning algorithm, and as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Baohe Zhang , Raghu Rajan , Luis Pineda , Nathan Lambert , André Biedenkapp , Kurtland Chua , Frank Hutter , Roberto Calandra

Prior authorization (PA) requires interpretation of complex and fragmented coverage policies, yet existing retrieval-augmented systems rely on static top-$K$ strategies with fixed numbers of retrieved sections. Such fixed retrieval can be…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Ruslan Sharifullin , Maxim Gorshkov , Hannah Clay