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Temporal difference learning (TD) is a simple iterative algorithm used to estimate the value function corresponding to a given policy in a Markov decision process. Although TD is one of the most widely used algorithms in reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-07 Jalaj Bhandari , Daniel Russo , Raghav Singal

Federated learning (FL) faces critical challenges, particularly in heterogeneous environments where non-independent and identically distributed data across clients can lead to unfair and inefficient model performance. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Mounssif Krouka , Chaouki Ben Issaid , Mehdi Bennis

A common goal in statistics and machine learning is to learn models that can perform well against distributional shifts, such as latent heterogeneous subpopulations, unknown covariate shifts, or unmodeled temporal effects. We develop and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-21 John Duchi , Hongseok Namkoong

Reinforcement learning with function approximation has recently achieved tremendous results in applications with large state spaces. This empirical success has motivated a growing body of theoretical work proposing necessary and sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Daniel Kane , Sihan Liu , Shachar Lovett , Gaurav Mahajan

The optimal objective is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how policies are evaluated and optimized. While total return maximization is the ideal objective in RL, discounted return maximization is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Shuyu Yin , Fei Wen , Peilin Liu , Tao Luo

Distributionally Robust Supervised Learning (DRSL) is necessary for building reliable machine learning systems. When machine learning is deployed in the real world, its performance can be significantly degraded because test data may follow…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-24 Weihua Hu , Gang Niu , Issei Sato , Masashi Sugiyama

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn a near-optimal policy from a fixed dataset of transitions collected by another policy. This problem has attracted a lot of attention recently, but most existing methods with strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Germano Gabbianelli , Gergely Neu , Nneka Okolo , Matteo Papini

The empirical success of distributional reinforcement learning (RL) highly relies on the choice of distribution divergence equipped with an appropriate distribution representation. In this paper, we propose \textit{Sinkhorn distributional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Ke Sun , Yingnan Zhao , Wulong Liu , Bei Jiang , Linglong Kong

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has evolved to be one of the main methods for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). However, existing RLHF methods are non-robust, and their performance deteriorates if the downstream…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Debmalya Mandal , Paulius Sasnauskas , Goran Radanovic

Seeking to improve model generalization, we consider a new approach based on distributionally robust learning (DRL) that applies stochastic gradient descent to the outer minimization problem. Our algorithm efficiently estimates the gradient…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-24 Soumyadip Ghosh , Mark Squillante

The exploration-exploitation dilemma has been a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) with complex model classes. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm, Monotonic Q-Learning with Upper Confidence Bound (MQL-UCB) for RL with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Heyang Zhao , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

We introduce a novel class of algorithms to efficiently approximate the unknown return distributions in policy evaluation problems from distributional reinforcement learning (DRL). The proposed distributional dynamic programming algorithms…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-22 Julian Gerstenberg , Ralph Neininger , Denis Spiegel

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance in the face of uncertainties. In this paper, we focus on action robust RL with the probabilistic policy execution uncertainty, in which,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Guanlin Liu , Zhihan Zhou , Han Liu , Lifeng Lai

Robust Reinforcement Learning tries to make predictions more robust to changes in the dynamics or rewards of the system. This problem is particularly important when the dynamics and rewards of the environment are estimated from the data. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-15 Pierre Clavier , Stéphanie Allassonière , Erwan Le Pennec

Temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation (linear TD) is a classic and powerful prediction algorithm in reinforcement learning. While it is well-understood that linear TD converges almost surely to a unique point,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Jiuqi Wang , Shangtong Zhang

Linear TD($\lambda$) is one of the most fundamental reinforcement learning algorithms for policy evaluation. Previously, convergence rates are typically established under the assumption of linearly independent features, which does not hold…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Zixuan Xie , Xinyu Liu , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang

Despite the high performance achieved by deep neural networks on various tasks, extensive studies have demonstrated that small tweaks in the input could fail the model predictions. This issue of deep neural networks has led to a number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Ming-Chang Chiu , Xuezhe Ma

Machine learning algorithms with empirical risk minimization are vulnerable under distributional shifts due to the greedy adoption of all the correlations found in training data. There is an emerging literature on tackling this problem by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Jiashuo Liu , Zheyan Shen , Peng Cui , Linjun Zhou , Kun Kuang , Bo Li

We present a unifying framework for designing and analysing distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms in terms of recursively estimating statistics of the return distribution. Our key insight is that DRL algorithms can be…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-22 Mark Rowland , Robert Dadashi , Saurabh Kumar , Rémi Munos , Marc G. Bellemare , Will Dabney

Reinforcement learning (RL) theory has largely focused on proving minimax sample complexity bounds. These require strategic exploration algorithms that use relatively limited function classes for representing the policy or value function.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-16 Cassidy Laidlaw , Banghua Zhu , Stuart Russell , Anca Dragan