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This research delves deeply into Meta Reinforcement Learning (Meta RL) through a exploration focusing on defining generalization limits and ensuring convergence. By employing a approach this article introduces an innovative theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Cangqing Wang , Mingxiu Sui , Dan Sun , Zecheng Zhang , Yan Zhou

Multi-task learning (MTL) is a methodology that aims to improve the general performance of estimation and prediction by sharing common information among related tasks. In the MTL, there are several assumptions for the relationships and…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-27 Akira Okazaki , Shuichi Kawano

In this paper, we study the generalization performance of regularized multi-task learning (RMTL) in a vector-valued framework, where MTL is considered as a learning process for vector-valued functions. We are mainly concerned with two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-08-29 Chao Zhang , Dacheng Tao , Tao Hu , Xiang Li

Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) methods such as RL$^2$ have emerged as promising approaches for learning data-efficient RL algorithms tailored to a given task distribution. However, they show poor asymptotic performance and struggle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Abhinav Bhatia , Samer B. Nashed , Shlomo Zilberstein

Reinforcement Learning (RL) with PPO-like clip objectives has become the standard choice for reward-based fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs). Although recent work has explored improved estimators of advantages and normalization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Philipp Becker , Niklas Freymuth , Serge Thilges , Fabian Otto , Gerhard Neumann

The idea of transfer in reinforcement learning (TRL) is intriguing: being able to transfer knowledge from one problem to another problem without learning everything from scratch. This promises quicker learning and learning more complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-13 Matthias Müller-Brockhausen , Mike Preuss , Aske Plaat

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

In reinforcement learning (RL), state representations are key to dealing with large or continuous state spaces. While one of the promises of deep learning algorithms is to automatically construct features well-tuned for the task they try to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Charline Le Lan , Stephen Tu , Mark Rowland , Anna Harutyunyan , Rishabh Agarwal , Marc G. Bellemare , Will Dabney

We study inference-time alignment for diffusion-based generative models, aiming to steer a base model toward high-reward outputs without updating its weights. Recent Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC)-based steering methods approximate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Weixin Wang , Yu Yang , Wei Deng , Pan Xu

Continuous-time reinforcement learning (CTRL) provides a natural framework for sequential decision-making in dynamic environments where interactions evolve continuously over time. While CTRL has shown growing empirical success, its ability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Runze Zhao , Yue Yu , Ruhan Wang , Chunfeng Huang , Dongruo Zhou

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated emergent capabilities in complex reasoning, largely spurred by rule-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques applied during the post-training. This has raised the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Sneheel Sarangi , Hanan Salam

We propose a new approach to value function approximation which combines linear temporal difference reinforcement learning with subspace identification. In practical applications, reinforcement learning (RL) is complicated by the fact that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-17 Byron Boots , Geoffrey J. Gordon

We propose a unified framework to study policy evaluation (PE) and the associated temporal difference (TD) methods for reinforcement learning in continuous time and space. We show that PE is equivalent to maintaining the martingale…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-02 Yanwei Jia , Xun Yu Zhou

A prevailing view holds that supervised fine-tuning (SFT) memorizes training data and fails to generalize, whereas reinforcement learning (RL) attains broader robustness. We revisit this claim through a systematic evaluation on two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Xiaofeng Lin , Hejian Sang , Zhipeng Wang , Xuezhou Zhang

Meta reinforcement learning (RL) allows agents to leverage experience across a distribution of tasks on which the agent can train at will, enabling faster learning of optimal policies on new test tasks. Despite its success in improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Tingting Ni , Maryam Kamgarpour

We explore fixed-horizon temporal difference (TD) methods, reinforcement learning algorithms for a new kind of value function that predicts the sum of rewards over a $\textit{fixed}$ number of future time steps. To learn the value function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-12 Kristopher De Asis , Alan Chan , Silviu Pitis , Richard S. Sutton , Daniel Graves

In this work, we present Transitive Reinforcement Learning (TRL), a new value learning algorithm based on a divide-and-conquer paradigm. TRL is designed for offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) problems, where the aim is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Seohong Park , Aditya Oberai , Pranav Atreya , Sergey Levine

In sequential decision-making problems, Return-Conditioned Supervised Learning (RCSL) has gained increasing recognition for its simplicity and stability in modern decision-making tasks. Unlike traditional offline reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Zhishuai Liu , Yu Yang , Ruhan Wang , Pan Xu , Dongruo Zhou

The standard reinforcement learning (RL) formulation considers the expectation of the (discounted) cumulative reward. This is limiting in applications where we are concerned with not only the expected performance, but also the distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-13 Changjian Li , Krzysztof Czarnecki

The temporal-difference methods TD($\lambda$) and Sarsa($\lambda$) form a core part of modern reinforcement learning. Their appeal comes from their good performance, low computational cost, and their simple interpretation, given by their…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-09-09 Harm van Seijen , A. Rupam Mahmood , Patrick M. Pilarski , Marlos C. Machado , Richard S. Sutton