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Learned representations in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have to extract task-relevant information from complex observations, balancing between robustness to distraction and informativeness to the policy. Such stable and rich…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Mete Kemertas , Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training is crucial for LLM alignment and reasoning, but existing policy-based methods, such as PPO and DPO, can fall short of fixing shortcuts inherited from pre-training. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Jin Peng Zhou , Kaiwen Wang , Jonathan Chang , Zhaolin Gao , Nathan Kallus , Kilian Q. Weinberger , Kianté Brantley , Wen Sun

Motivated by practical applications where stable long-term performance is critical-such as robotics, operations research, and healthcare-we study the problem of distributionally robust (DR) average-reward reinforcement learning. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Zijun Chen , Shengbo Wang , Nian Si

In real scenarios, state observations that an agent observes may contain measurement errors or adversarial noises, misleading the agent to take suboptimal actions or even collapse while training. In this paper, we study the training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-23 Ke Sun , Yingnan Zhao , Shangling Jui , Linglong Kong

We study off-dynamics Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the policy is trained on a source domain and deployed to a distinct target domain. We aim to solve this problem via online distributionally robust Markov decision processes (DRMDPs),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

We present a distributional approach to theoretical analyses of reinforcement learning algorithms for constant step-sizes. We demonstrate its effectiveness by presenting simple and unified proofs of convergence for a variety of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-30 Philip Amortila , Doina Precup , Prakash Panangaden , Marc G. Bellemare

Reinforcement learning (RL) is attracting attention as an effective way to solve sequential optimization problems that involve high dimensional state/action space and stochastic uncertainties. Many such problems involve constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-01 Haeun Yoo , Victor M. Zavala , Jay H. Lee

We investigate reinforcement learning (RL) in the presence of distributional mismatch between training and deployment, where policies trained in simulators often underperform in practice due to mismatches between training and deployment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Debamita Ghosh , George K. Atia , Yue Wang

To address the needs of modeling uncertainty in sensitive machine learning applications, the setup of distributionally robust optimization (DRO) seeks good performance uniformly across a variety of tasks. The recent multi-distribution…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-01 Rafael Hanashiro , Patrick Jaillet

Q-learning is widely used algorithm in reinforcement learning community. Under the lookup table setting, its convergence is well established. However, its behavior is known to be unstable with the linear function approximation case. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Han-Dong Lim , Donghwan Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) for exponential-utility optimization in discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs) lacks principled value-based algorithms. We address this gap in the fixed risk-aversion setting. Building on the Bellman-type…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Gugan Thoppe , L. A. Prashanth , Ankur Naskar , Sanjay Bhat

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) powered by neural net approximation of the Q function has had enormous empirical success. While the theory of RL has traditionally focused on linear function approximation (or eluder dimension) approaches,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Baihe Huang , Kaixuan Huang , Sham M. Kakade , Jason D. Lee , Qi Lei , Runzhe Wang , Jiaqi Yang

Relative temporal-difference (TD) learning was introduced to mitigate the slow convergence of TD methods when the discount factor approaches one by subtracting a baseline from the temporal-difference update. While this idea has been studied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Masoud S. Sakha , Rushikesh Kamalapurkar , Sean Meyn

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved empirical success in various domains. One core task in DRL is distributional policy evaluation, which involves estimating the return distribution $\eta^\pi$ for a given policy $\pi$.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-17 Yang Peng , Liangyu Zhang , Zhihua Zhang

Continuous-time reinforcement learning (CTRL) provides a principled framework for sequential decision-making in environments where interactions evolve continuously over time. Despite its empirical success, the theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Runze Zhao , Yue Yu , Adams Yiyue Zhu , Chen Yang , Dongruo Zhou

We study constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) from a novel perspective by setting constraints directly on state density functions, rather than the value functions considered by previous works. State density has a clear physical and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Zengyi Qin , Yuxiao Chen , Chuchu Fan

Distributionally robust offline reinforcement learning (RL), which seeks robust policy training against environment perturbation by modeling dynamics uncertainty, calls for function approximations when facing large state-action spaces.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

Distributional reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework increasingly adopted in safety-critical domains for its ability to optimize risk-sensitive objectives. However, the role of the discount factor is often overlooked, as it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Mehrdad Moghimi , Anthony Coache , Hyejin Ku

We consider model-free reinforcement learning for infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with a continuous state space and unknown transition kernel, when only a single sample path under an arbitrary policy of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-24 Devavrat Shah , Qiaomin Xie

Robust Reinforcement Learning (RRL) is a promising Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigm aimed at training robust to uncertainty or disturbances models, making them more efficient for real-world applications. Following this paradigm,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Anton Plaksin , Vitaly Kalev