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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…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to…
Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) is concerned with learning a rewarding policy by executing another policy that gathers samples of experience. While the former policy (i.e. target policy) is rewarding but in-expressive (in most cases,…
This paper examines the exploration-exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), a framework for improving the reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent studies suggest that RLVR can elicit strong…
Policy-gradient methods in Reinforcement Learning(RL) are very universal and widely applied in practice but their performance suffers from the high variance of the gradient estimate. Several procedures were proposed to reduce it including…
Inferring reward functions from demonstrations and pairwise preferences are auspicious approaches for aligning Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents with human intentions. However, state-of-the art methods typically focus on learning a single…
Evaluating the performance of an ongoing policy plays a vital role in many areas such as medicine and economics, to provide crucial instructions on the early-stop of the online experiment and timely feedback from the environment. Policy…
In the rapidly evolving domain of electrical power systems, the Volt-VAR optimization (VVO) is increasingly critical, especially with the burgeoning integration of renewable energy sources. Traditional approaches to learning-based VVO in…
In online reinforcement learning (RL), efficient exploration remains particularly challenging in high-dimensional environments with sparse rewards. In low-dimensional environments, where tabular parameterization is possible, count-based…
Policy gradient methods in actor-critic reinforcement learning (RL) have become perhaps the most promising approaches to solving continuous optimal control problems. However, the trial-and-error nature of RL and the inherent randomness…
This paper studies reward-agnostic exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) -- a scenario where the learner is unware of the reward functions during the exploration stage -- and designs an algorithm that improves over the state of the…
Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), which learns a reward model from human preference data and then optimizes a policy to favor preferred responses, has emerged as a central paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs)…
One of the bottlenecks preventing Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms (DRL) from real-world applications is how to explore the environment and collect informative transitions efficiently. The present paper describes bounded exploration,…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) faces significant challenges in addressing the hard-exploration problems in tasks with sparse or deceptive rewards and large state spaces. These challenges severely limit the practical application of DRL.…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been proven its efficiency in capturing users' dynamic interests in recent literature. However, training a DRL agent is challenging, because of the sparse environment in recommender systems (RS), DRL…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to balance exploiting the current best strategy with exploring new options that could lead to higher rewards. Most common RL algorithms use undirected exploration, i.e., select random sequences of…
Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…
We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for multi-objective decision-making, where the agent seeks to optimize a vector of rewards rather than a single scalar value. The objective is to ensure that the time-averaged reward vector…
Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize policies that balance the expected reward and risk. In this paper, we present a novel risk-sensitive RL framework that employs an Iterated Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR)…
Motivated by applications such as cloud platforms allocating GPUs to users or governments deploying mobile health units across competing regions, we study the dynamic allocation of a reusable resource to strategic agents with private…