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Interactive assessments generate sequential process data that are not well handled by conventional item response models. Existing MDP-based measurement approaches, such as the Markov decision process measurement model (MDP-MM, LaMar, 2018),…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-12 Wenqian Xu , Feng Ji

Conventional off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) focuses on maximizing the expected return of scalar rewards. Distributional RL (DRL), in contrast, studies the distribution of returns with the distributional Bellman operator in a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-15 Dong Neuck Lee , Michael R. Kosorok

Distributional approaches to value-based reinforcement learning model the entire distribution of returns, rather than just their expected values, and have recently been shown to yield state-of-the-art empirical performance. This was…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-23 Mark Rowland , Marc G. Bellemare , Will Dabney , Rémi Munos , Yee Whye Teh

How can a reinforcement learning (RL) agent prepare to solve downstream tasks if those tasks are not known a priori? One approach is unsupervised skill discovery, a class of algorithms that learn a set of policies without access to a reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Benjamin Eysenbach , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Sergey Levine

This paper studies the continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL) for optimal switching problems across multiple regimes. We consider a type of exploratory formulation under entropy regularization where the agent randomizes both the timing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-23 Yijie Huang , Mengge Li , Xiang Yu , Zhou Zhou

Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential in sequential decision-making. At present, mainstream RL algorithms are data-driven, which usually yield better asymptotic performance but much slower convergence compared with model-driven…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yang Guan , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li , Jie Li , Jianyu Chen , Bo Cheng

Reward sparsity in long-horizon reinforcement learning (RL) tasks remains a significant challenge, while existing outcome-based reward shaping struggles to define meaningful immediate rewards without introducing bias or requiring explicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Zetian Sun , Dongfang Li , Zhuoen Chen , Yuhuai Qin , Baotian Hu

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…

We investigate the geometry of optimal memoryless time independent decision making in relation to the amount of information that the acting agent has about the state of the system. We show that the expected long term reward, discounted or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-04-07 Guido Montufar , Johannes Rauh

The integration of Reinforcement Learning (RL) with heuristic methods is an emerging trend for solving optimization problems, which leverages RL's ability to learn from the data generated during the search process. One promising approach is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Arthur Müller , Lukas Vollenkemper

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods learn optimal decisions in the presence of a stationary environment. However, the stationary assumption on the environment is very restrictive. In many real world problems like traffic signal control,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Sindhu Padakandla , Prabuchandran K. J , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have proven transformative in a range of domains. To tackle real-world domains, these systems often use neural networks to learn policies directly from pixels or other high-dimensional sensory input.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Nishil Patel , Sebastian Lee , Stefano Sarao Mannelli , Sebastian Goldt , Andrew Saxe

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents sequentially interact with changing environments while aiming to maximize the obtained rewards. Usually, rewards are observed only after acting, and so the goal is to maximize the expected cumulative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Nadav Merlis , Dorian Baudry , Vianney Perchet

Linear temporal logic (LTL) and, more generally, $\omega$-regular objectives are alternatives to the traditional discount sum and average reward objectives in reinforcement learning (RL), offering the advantage of greater comprehensibility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Xuan-Bach Le , Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Alexander Rabinovich , Luke Ong

Autonomous multi-agent systems such as hospital robots and package delivery drones often operate in highly uncertain environments and are expected to achieve complex temporal task objectives while ensuring safety. While learning-based…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Sheryl Paul , Anand Balakrishnan , Xin Qin , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

Social goods, such as healthcare, smart city, and information networks, often produce ordered event data in continuous time. The generative processes of these event data can be very complex, requiring flexible models to capture their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-29 Shuang Li , Shuai Xiao , Shixiang Zhu , Nan Du , Yao Xie , Le Song

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated strong potential in training large language models (LLMs) capable of complex reasoning for real-world problem solving. More recently, RL has been leveraged to create sophisticated LLM-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Bowen Jin , Jinsung Yoon , Priyanka Kargupta , Sercan O. Arik , Jiawei Han

Ensembling large language models (LLMs) can effectively combine diverse strengths of different models, offering a promising approach to enhance performance across various tasks. However, existing methods typically rely on fixed weighting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Yuqian Fu , Yuanheng Zhu , Jiajun Chai , Guojun Yin , Wei Lin , Qichao Zhang , Dongbin Zhao

We present an optimistic Q-learning algorithm for regret minimization in average reward reinforcement learning under an additional assumption on the underlying MDP that for all policies, the time to visit some frequent state $s_0$ is finite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Priyank Agrawal , Shipra Agrawal

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training LLM-based agents, yet remains limited by low sample efficiency, stemming not only from sparse outcome feedback but also from the agent's inability to leverage prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Dilxat Muhtar , Jiashun Liu , Wei Gao , Weixun Wang , Shaopan Xiong , Ju Huang , Siran Yang , Wenbo Su , Jiamang Wang , Ling Pan , Bo Zheng