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Variational approximation techniques and inference for stochastic models in machine learning has gained much attention the last years. Especially in the case of Gaussian Processes (GP) and their deep versions, Deep Gaussian Processes…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-09-24 Roman Föll , Ingo Steinwart

The effectiveness of credit assignment in reinforcement learning (RL) when dealing with high-dimensional data is influenced by the success of representation learning via deep neural networks, and has implications for the sample efficiency…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Burcu Küçükoğlu , Sander Dalm , Marcel van Gerven

Lifelong reinforcement learning (RL) has been developed as a paradigm for extending single-task RL to more realistic, dynamic settings. In lifelong RL, the "life" of an RL agent is modeled as a stream of tasks drawn from a task…

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have achieved tremendous success on a range of challenging tasks. However, safety concerns remain when these methods are deployed on real-world applications, necessitating risk-aware…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Alonso Granados , Jason Pacheco

Deterministic-policy actor-critic algorithms for continuous control improve the actor by plugging its actions into the critic and ascending the action-value gradient, which is obtained by chaining the actor's Jacobian matrix with the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Pierluca D'Oro , Wojciech Jaśkowski

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental framework for sequential decision-making, in which an agent learns an optimal policy through interactions with an unknown environment. In settings with function approximation, many existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ruiquan Huang , Donghao Li , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

We present a distributionally robust PAC-Bayesian framework for certifying the performance of learning-based finite-horizon controllers. While existing PAC-Bayes control literature typically assumes bounded losses and matching training and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Domagoj Herceg , Duarte Antunes

We reformulate the option framework as two parallel augmented MDPs. Under this novel formulation, all policy optimization algorithms can be used off the shelf to learn intra-option policies, option termination conditions, and a master…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-12 Shangtong Zhang , Shimon Whiteson

We present the first class of policy-gradient algorithms that work with both state-value and policy function-approximation, and are guaranteed to converge under off-policy training. Our solution targets problems in reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-23 Hamid Reza Maei

Actor-critic algorithms have become a cornerstone in reinforcement learning (RL), leveraging the strengths of both policy-based and value-based methods. Despite recent progress in understanding their statistical efficiency, no existing work…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-07 Kevin Tan , Wei Fan , Yuting Wei

Substantial advancements to model-based reinforcement learning algorithms have been impeded by the model-bias induced by the collected data, which generally hurts performance. Meanwhile, their inherent sample efficiency warrants utility for…

Despite the popularity of the actor-critic method and the practical needs of collaborative policy training, existing works typically either overlook environmental heterogeneity or give up personalization altogether by training a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Leo Muxing Wang , Pengkun Yang , Lili Su

Biological agents learn and act intelligently in spite of a highly limited capacity to process and store information. Many real-world problems involve continuous control, which represents a difficult task for artificial intelligence agents.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Tailia Malloy , Chris R. Sims , Tim Klinger , Miao Liu , Matthew Riemer , Gerald Tesauro

PAC-Bayes has recently re-emerged as an effective theory with which one can derive principled learning algorithms with tight performance guarantees. However, applications of PAC-Bayes to bandit problems are relatively rare, which is a great…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Hamish Flynn , David Reeb , Melih Kandemir , Jan Peters

Recent successful deep reinforcement learning algorithms, such as Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) or Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), are fundamentally variations of conservative policy iteration (CPI). These algorithms iterate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-27 Erinc Merdivan , Sten Hanke , Matthieu Geist

Compared to on-policy counterparts, off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning can improve data efficiency by repeatedly using the previously gathered data. However, off-policy learning becomes challenging when the discrepancy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-27 Baturay Saglam , Dogan C. Cicek , Furkan B. Mutlu , Suleyman S. Kozat

We consider numerical resolution of principal-agent (PA) problems in continuous time. We formulate a generic PA model with continuous and lump payments and a multi-dimensional strategy of the agent. To tackle the resulting…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-12-09 Michael Ludkovski , Changgen Xie , Zimu Zhu

In safety-critical robotic tasks, potential failures must be reduced, and multiple constraints must be met, such as avoiding collisions, limiting energy consumption, and maintaining balance. Thus, applying safe reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Dohyeong Kim , Kyungjae Lee , Songhwai Oh

Risk-aware Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms like SAC and TD3 were shown empirically to outperform their risk-neutral counterparts in a variety of continuous-action tasks. However, the theoretical basis for the pessimistic objectives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan

Soft Actor-Critic is a state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithm for continuous action settings that is not applicable to discrete action settings. Many important settings involve discrete actions, however, and so here we derive an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-21 Petros Christodoulou