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In Reinforcement Learning (RL), the goal of agents is to discover an optimal policy that maximizes the expected cumulative rewards. This objective may also be viewed as finding a policy that optimizes a linear function of its state-action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Navdeep Kumar , Kaixin Wang , Kfir Levy , Shie Mannor

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach for training agents to perform tasks, but designing an appropriate reward mechanism is critical to its success. However, in many cases, the complexity of the learning objectives goes beyond…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-16 Ernst Moritz Hahn , Mateo Perez , Sven Schewe , Fabio Somenzi , Ashutosh Trivedi , Dominik Wojtczak

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov Decision Processes in which an agent repeatedly interacts with an environment that is modeled by a controlled Markov process. At each time step $t$, it earns a reward, and also incurs a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Rahul Singh , Abhishek Gupta , Ness B. Shroff

Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the careful design of the reward function. However, accurately assigning rewards to each state-action pair in Long-Term Reinforcement Learning (LTRL) tasks remains a significant challenge. As a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Qi Ju , Falin Hei , Zhemei Fang , Yunfeng Luo

We develop theory and algorithms for average-reward on-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL). We first consider bounding the difference of the long-term average reward for two policies. We show that previous work based on the discounted return…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Yiming Zhang , Keith W. Ross

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a general framework concerned with an agent that seeks to maximize rewards in an environment. The learning typically happens through trial and error using explorative methods, such as epsilon-greedy. There are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Per-Arne Andersen , Morten Goodwin , Ole-Christoffer Granmo

Inspired by recent progress in multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (RL), in this work we examine the collective intelligent behaviour of theoretical universal agents by introducing a weighted mixture operation. Given a weighted set of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-14 Samuel Allen Alexander , David Quarel , Len Du , Marcus Hutter

To date, distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) methods have exclusively focused on the discounted setting, where an agent aims to optimize a discounted sum of rewards over time. In this work, we extend distributional RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Juan Sebastian Rojas , Chi-Guhn Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework to optimize a control policy using rewards that are revealed by the system as a response to a control action. In its standard form, RL involves a single agent that uses its policy to accomplish a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-11-24 Juan Cervino , Juan Andres Bazerque , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro

Reinforcement learning algorithms in multi-agent systems deliver highly resilient and adaptable solutions for common problems in telecommunications,aerospace, and industrial robotics. However, achieving an optimal global goal remains a…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Changgang Zheng , Shufan Yang , Juan Parra-Ullauri , Antonio Garcia-Dominguez , Nelly Bencomo

The average-reward formulation of reinforcement learning (RL) has drawn increased interest in recent years for its ability to solve temporally-extended problems without relying on discounting. Meanwhile, in the discounted setting,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Jacob Adamczyk , Volodymyr Makarenko , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

Many traditional algorithms for solving combinatorial optimization problems involve using hand-crafted heuristics that sequentially construct a solution. Such heuristics are designed by domain experts and may often be suboptimal due to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Nina Mazyavkina , Sergey Sviridov , Sergei Ivanov , Evgeny Burnaev

In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Grigorii Veviurko , Wendelin Böhmer , Mathijs de Weerdt

Randomized experiments (a.k.a. A/B tests) are a powerful tool for estimating treatment effects, to inform decisions making in business, healthcare and other applications. In many problems, the treatment has a lasting effect that evolves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ziyang Tang , Yiheng Duan , Stephanie Zhang , Lihong Li

This research focuses on enhancing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms by integrating penalty functions to guide agents in avoiding unwanted actions while optimizing rewards. The goal is to improve the learning process by ensuring that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Sai Gana Sandeep Pula , Sathish A. P. Kumar , Sumit Jha , Arvind Ramanathan

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of finding a reward function that generates a given optimal policy for a given Markov Decision Process. This paper looks at an algorithmic-independent geometric analysis of the IRL problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-19 Abi Komanduru , Jean Honorio

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Kianté Brantley , Hal Daumé , Miroslav Dudik , Robert Schapire

Learning a predictive model of the mean return, or value function, plays a critical role in many reinforcement learning algorithms. Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has been shown to improve performance by modeling the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Ju-Seung Byun , Andrew Perrault

We introduce a new algorithm for multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) with linear preferences, with the goal of enabling few-shot adaptation to new tasks. In MORL, the aim is to learn policies over multiple competing objectives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-07 Runzhe Yang , Xingyuan Sun , Karthik Narasimhan

In value-based reinforcement learning (RL), unlike in supervised learning, the agent faces not a single, stationary, approximation problem, but a sequence of value prediction problems. Each time the policy improves, the nature of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Will Dabney , André Barreto , Mark Rowland , Robert Dadashi , John Quan , Marc G. Bellemare , David Silver