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Safety is an essential requirement for reinforcement learning systems. The newly emerging framework of robust constrained Markov decision processes allows learning policies that satisfy long-term constraints while providing guarantees under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 David M. Bossens , Atsushi Nitanda

In reward-free reinforcement learning (RL), an agent explores the environment first without any reward information, in order to achieve certain learning goals afterwards for any given reward. In this paper we focus on reward-free RL under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Yuan Cheng , Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

Envisioned application areas for reinforcement learning (RL) include autonomous driving, precision agriculture, and finance, which all require RL agents to make decisions in the real world. A significant challenge hindering the adoption of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-20 Dominik Baumann , Erfaun Noorani , James Price , Ole Peters , Colm Connaughton , Thomas B. Schön

Offline policy learning is aimed at learning decision-making policies using existing datasets of trajectories without collecting additional data. The primary motivation for using reinforcement learning (RL) instead of supervised learning…

Low-rank and nonsmooth matrix optimization problems capture many fundamental tasks in statistics and machine learning. While significant progress has been made in recent years in developing efficient methods for \textit{smooth} low-rank…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-10 Dan Garber , Atara Kaplan

Based on the ideas of arXiv:1710.06612, we consider the problem of minimization of the Holder-continuous non-smooth functional $f$ with non-positive convex (generally, non-smooth) Lipschitz-continuous functional constraint. We propose some…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-03 Fedor Stonyakin , Alexey Stepanov , Alexander Gasnikov , Alexander Titov

In many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL), interactions with the environment are limited due to cost or feasibility. This presents a challenge to traditional RL algorithms since the max-return objective involves an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-05 Ofir Nachum , Bo Dai , Ilya Kostrikov , Yinlam Chow , Lihong Li , Dale Schuurmans

We study the offline reinforcement learning (RL) in the face of unmeasured confounders. Due to the lack of online interaction with the environment, offline RL is facing the following two significant challenges: (i) the agent may be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Zuyue Fu , Zhengling Qi , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Yanxun Xu , Michael R. Kosorok

The practicality of reinforcement learning algorithms has been limited due to poor scaling with respect to the problem size, as the sample complexity of learning an $\epsilon$-optimal policy is $\tilde{\Omega}\left(|S||A|H^3 /…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Tyler Sam , Yudong Chen , Christina Lee Yu

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

A common technique in reinforcement learning is to evaluate the value function from Monte Carlo simulations of a given policy, and use the estimated value function to obtain a new policy which is greedy with respect to the estimated value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Anna Winnicki , R. Srikant

Despite impressive results, reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from slow convergence and requires a large variety of tuning strategies. In this paper, we investigate the ability of RL algorithms on simple continuous control tasks. We show…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Daniel Layeghi , Steve Tonneau , Michael Mistry

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) is to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. In this paper, we focus on model-free robust RL, where the uncertainty set is defined to be centering at a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou

Various algorithms for reinforcement learning (RL) exhibit dramatic variation in their convergence rates as a function of problem structure. Such problem-dependent behavior is not captured by worst-case analyses and has accordingly inspired…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-01-24 Koulik Khamaru , Eric Xia , Martin J. Wainwright , Michael I. Jordan

Off-policy policy optimization is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The algorithms designed for this problem often suffer from high variance in their estimators, which results in poor sample efficiency, and have issues…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Daoming Lyu , Qi Qi , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Hengshuai Yao , Tianbao Yang , Bo Liu

In this paper, we consider non-convex optimization problems under \textit{unknown} yet safety-critical constraints. Such problems naturally arise in a variety of domains including robotics, manufacturing, and medical procedures, where it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Mohammad Fereydounian , Zebang Shen , Aryan Mokhtari , Amin Karbasi , Hamed Hassani

We consider the problem of solving robust Markov decision process (MDP), which involves a set of discounted, finite state, finite action space MDPs with uncertain transition kernels. The goal of planning is to find a robust policy that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Yan Li , Guanghui Lan , Tuo Zhao

Offline reinforcement learning (offline RL) considers problems where learning is performed using only previously collected samples and is helpful for the settings in which collecting new data is costly or risky. In model-based offline RL,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Mustafa O. Karabag , Ufuk Topcu

We present an off-policy actor-critic algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that combines ideas from gradient-free optimization via stochastic search with learned action-value function. The result is a simple procedure consisting of…

Diffusion policy sampling enables reinforcement learning (RL) to represent multimodal action distributions beyond suboptimal unimodal Gaussian policies. However, existing diffusion-based RL methods primarily focus on offline settings for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xiaoyuan Cheng , Wenxuan Yuan , Boyang Li , Yuanchao Xu , Yiming Yang , Hao Liang , Bei Peng , Robert Loftin , Zhuo Sun , Yukun Hu