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Representation learning lies at the heart of the empirical success of deep learning for dealing with the curse of dimensionality. However, the power of representation learning has not been fully exploited yet in reinforcement learning (RL),…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-08 Tongzheng Ren , Tianjun Zhang , Csaba Szepesvári , Bo Dai

Value function learning plays a central role in many state-of-the-art reinforcement-learning algorithms. Many popular algorithms like Q-learning do not optimize any objective function, but are fixed-point iterations of some variant of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Yihao Feng , Lihong Li , Qiang Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to expand the capabilities of language models, but it is unclear if current RL techniques promote the discovery of novel behaviors, or simply sharpen those already present in the base model. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Jens Tuyls , Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Jordan T. Ash

Many real-world applications require an agent to make robust and deliberate decisions with multimodal information (e.g., robots with multi-sensory inputs). However, it is very challenging to train the agent via reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Jinming Ma , Feng Wu , Yingfeng Chen , Xianpeng Ji , Yu Ding

Representation learning often plays a critical role in reinforcement learning by managing the curse of dimensionality. A representative class of algorithms exploits a spectral decomposition of the stochastic transition dynamics to construct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Tongzheng Ren , Tianjun Zhang , Lisa Lee , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

Reliable long-horizon value prediction is difficult in offline reinforcement learning because fitted value methods combine bootstrapping, function approximation, and distribution shift, while standard guarantees often require Bellman…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-11 Lars van der Laan , Nathan Kallus

Improving data utilization efficiency is critical for scaling reinforcement learning (RL) for long-horizon tasks where generating trajectories is expensive. However, the dominant RL methods for LLMs are largely on-policy: they update each…

The Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM), an important tool used in machine learning in particular for unsupervized learning tasks, is investigated from the perspective of its spectral properties. Starting from empirical observations, we…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2018-01-17 Aurélien Decelle , Giancarlo Fissore , Cyril Furtlehner

Rewards serve as a measure of user satisfaction and act as a limiting factor in interactive recommender systems. In this research, we focus on the problem of learning to reward (LTR), which is fundamental to reinforcement learning. Previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Jialin Liu , Xinyan Su , Zeyu He , Xiangyu Zhao , Jun Li

This paper aims at the algorithmic/theoretical core of reinforcement learning (RL) by introducing the novel class of proximal Bellman mappings. These mappings are defined in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs), to benefit from the…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-15 Yuki Akiyama , Konstantinos Slavakis

Invariant Contrastive Learning (ICL) methods have achieved impressive performance across various domains. However, the absence of latent space representation for distortion (augmentation)-related information in the latent space makes ICL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Sifan Song , Jinfeng Wang , Qiaochu Zhao , Xiang Li , Dufan Wu , Angelos Stefanidis , Jionglong Su , S. Kevin Zhou , Quanzheng Li

In this paper, we study the offline RL problem with linear function approximation. Our main structural assumption is that the MDP has low inherent Bellman error, which stipulates that linear value functions have linear Bellman backups with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra

Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a central optimisation framework in machine learning. Although RL agents can converge to optimal solutions, the definition of ``optimality'' depends on the environment's statistical properties. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Bert Verbruggen , Arne Vanhoyweghen , Vincent Ginis

In this paper, we study policy evaluation in continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL), where the state follows an unknown stochastic differential equation (SDE), but only discrete-time data are available. We first highlight that the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-23 Yuhua Zhu

This paper designs novel nonparametric Bellman mappings in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs) for reinforcement learning (RL). The proposed mappings benefit from the rich approximating properties of RKHSs, adopt no assumptions on the…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-01 Yuki Akiyama , Minh Vu , Konstantinos Slavakis

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown remarkable abilities in learning policies for decision-making tasks. However, RL is often hindered by issues such as low sample efficiency, lack of interpretability, and sparse supervision signals. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Xidong Feng , Ziyu Wan , Mengyue Yang , Ziyan Wang , Girish A. Koushik , Yali Du , Ying Wen , Jun Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) with continuous time and state/action spaces is often data-intensive and brittle under nuisance variability and shift, motivating methods that exploit value-preserving structures to stabilize and improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Zuyuan Zhang , Fei Xu Yu , Tian Lan

We present a representation-driven framework for reinforcement learning. By representing policies as estimates of their expected values, we leverage techniques from contextual bandits to guide exploration and exploitation. Particularly,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Ofir Nabati , Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn an effective policy from a static dataset. To alleviate extrapolation errors, existing studies often uniformly regularize the value function or policy updates across all states. However, due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Qin-Wen Luo , Ming-Kun Xie , Ye-Wen Wang , Sheng-Jun Huang

We show that several major algorithms of reinforcement learning (RL) fit into the framework of categorical cybernetics, that is to say, parametrised bidirectional processes. We build on our previous work in which we show that value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Jules Hedges , Riu Rodríguez Sakamoto