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We develop provably safe and convergent reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for control of nonlinear dynamical systems, bridging the gap between the hard safety guarantees of control theory and the convergence guarantees of RL theory.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Wesley A. Suttle , Vipul K. Sharma , Krishna C. Kosaraju , S. Sivaranjani , Ji Liu , Vijay Gupta , Brian M. Sadler

Distribution shifts and minority subpopulations frequently undermine the reliability of deep neural networks trained using Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM). Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) addresses this by optimizing for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Aheer Sravon , Devdyuti Mazumder , Md. Ibrahim

Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting challenge in deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Despite dramatic improvements have been made, the problem is far from being solved and is especially challenging in environments with sparse or delayed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Federico Malato , Ville Hautamaki

We initiate the mathematical study of replicability as an algorithmic property in the context of reinforcement learning (RL). We focus on the fundamental setting of discounted tabular MDPs with access to a generative model. Inspired by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Amin Karbasi , Grigoris Velegkas , Lin F. Yang , Felix Zhou

This thesis rigorously studies fundamental reinforcement learning (RL) methods in modern practical considerations, including robust RL, distributional RL, and offline RL with neural function approximation. The thesis first prepares the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Thanh Nguyen-Tang

Standard deep reinforcement learning (DRL) aims to maximize expected reward, considering collected experiences equally in formulating a policy. This differs from human decision-making, where gains and losses are valued differently and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-17 Jared Markowitz , Ryan W. Gardner , Ashley Llorens , Raman Arora , I-Jeng Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) struggles to scale to large, combinatorial action spaces common in many real-world problems. This paper introduces a novel framework for training discrete diffusion models as highly effective policies in these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Haitong Ma , Ofir Nabati , Aviv Rosenberg , Bo Dai , Oran Lang , Craig Boutilier , Na Li , Shie Mannor , Lior Shani , Guy Tenneholtz

We study the problem of off-policy evaluation (OPE) in reinforcement learning (RL), where the goal is to estimate the performance of a policy from the data generated by another policy(ies). In particular, we focus on the doubly robust (DR)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-05-25 Mehrdad Farajtabar , Yinlam Chow , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

The integration of distributed energy resources (DER) has escalated the challenge of voltage magnitude regulation in distribution networks. Traditional model-based approaches, which rely on complex sequential mathematical formulations,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-11-05 Shengren Hou , Peter Palensky , Pedro P. Vergara

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

Route planning is essential to mobile robot navigation problems. In recent years, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been applied to learning optimal planning policies in stochastic environments without prior knowledge. However, existing…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-04-21 Xi Lin , Paul Szenher , John D. Martin , Brendan Englot

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

The Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP) framework focuses on designing control policies that are robust against the parameter uncertainties due to the mismatches between the simulator model and real-world settings. An RMDP problem is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Kishan Panaganti , Dileep Kalathil

Learned representations in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have to extract task-relevant information from complex observations, balancing between robustness to distraction and informativeness to the policy. Such stable and rich…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Mete Kemertas , Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a sub-domain of machine learning, mainly concerned with solving sequential decision-making problems by a learning agent that interacts with the decision environment to improve its behavior through the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Hossein Hassani , Ehsan Hallaji , Roozbeh Razavi-Far , Mehrdad Saif , Liang Lin

Given the inherent non-stationarity prevalent in real-world applications, continual Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to equip the agent with the capability to address a series of sequentially presented decision-making tasks. Within this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Feng Chen , Fuguang Han , Cong Guan , Lei Yuan , Zhilong Zhang , Yang Yu , Zongzhang Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become an effective way to improve prompt alignment and perceptual quality in diffusion and flow-matching generators. A critical step for applying online RL to flow matching is turning the deterministic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Jade Zou , Tao Huang , Weijie Kong , Junzhe Li , Yue Wu , Qi Tian , Jiangfeng Xiong , Jianwei Zhang , Liefeng Bo , Zhao Zhong

In this paper, we study the optimal dividend problem under the continuous time diffusion model with the bounded dividend rate from the Reinforcement Learning (RL) perspective. Unlike the standard literature, our main focus will be on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-30 Lihua Bai , Thejani Gamage , Jin Ma , Gaozhan Wang

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to explicitly infer an underlying reward function based on collected expert demonstrations. Considering that obtaining expert demonstrations can be costly, the focus of current IRL techniques is on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-16 Lu Li , Yuxin Pan , Ruobing Chen , Jie Liu , Zilin Wang , Yu Liu , Zhiheng Li

Although Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been popular in many disciplines including robotics, state-of-the-art DRL algorithms still struggle to learn long-horizon, multi-step and sparse reward tasks, such as stacking several blocks…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-10 Xintong Yang , Ze Ji , Jing Wu , Yu-kun Lai