English
Related papers

Related papers: Towards Formalizing Reinforcement Learning Theory

200 papers

This paper presents a review of the field of reinforcement learning (RL), with a focus on providing a comprehensive overview of the key concepts, techniques, and algorithms for beginners. RL has a unique setting, jargon, and mathematics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Mohamed-Amine Chadi , Hajar Mousannif

Detailed routing remains one of the most complex and time-consuming steps in modern physical design due to the challenges posed by shrinking feature sizes and stricter design rules. Prior detailed routers achieve state-of-the-art results by…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Afsara Khan , Austin Rovinski

Q-learning with neural network function approximation (neural Q-learning for short) is among the most prevalent deep reinforcement learning algorithms. Despite its empirical success, the non-asymptotic convergence rate of neural Q-learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-05 Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

We consider emphatic temporal-difference learning algorithms for policy evaluation in discounted Markov decision processes with finite spaces. Such algorithms were recently proposed by Sutton, Mahmood, and White (2015) as an improved…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-29 Huizhen Yu

This chapter studies emerging cyber-attacks on reinforcement learning (RL) and introduces a quantitative approach to analyze the vulnerabilities of RL. Focusing on adversarial manipulation on the cost signals, we analyze the performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-22 Yunhan Huang , Quanyan Zhu

In reinforcement learning (RL), the consideration of multivariate reward signals has led to fundamental advancements in multi-objective decision-making, transfer learning, and representation learning. This work introduces the first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Harley Wiltzer , Jesse Farebrother , Arthur Gretton , Mark Rowland

Reward models are central to both reinforcement learning (RL) with language models and inference-time verification. However, existing reward models often lack temporal consistency, leading to ineffective policy updates and unstable RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Dan Zhang , Min Cai , Jonathan Light , Ziniu Hu , Yisong Yue , Jie Tang

Ensuring that reinforcement learning (RL) controllers satisfy safety and reliability constraints in real-world settings remains challenging: state-avoidance and constrained Markov decision processes often fail to capture trajectory-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Alper Kamil Bozkurt , Calin Belta , Ming C. Lin

In this paper, we provide a unified analysis of temporal difference learning algorithms with linear function approximators by exploiting their connections to Markov jump linear systems (MJLS). We tailor the MJLS theory developed in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-06 Bin Hu , Usman Ahmed Syed

As language models continue to rapidly improve, we can expect their actions and reasoning to become difficult or impossible for weaker agents and humans to follow, undermining interpretability and oversight. With an eye on long-term…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Robert West , Ashton Anderson , Ece Kamar , Eric Horvitz

We propose an automata-theoretic approach for reinforcement learning (RL) under complex spatio-temporal constraints with time windows. The problem is formulated using a Markov decision process under a bounded temporal logic constraint.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Xiaoshan Lin , Abbasali Koochakzadeh , Yasin Yazicioglu , Derya Aksaray

Reinforcement learning (RL) depends critically on the choice of reward functions used to capture the de- sired behavior and constraints of a robot. Usually, these are handcrafted by a expert designer and represent heuristics for relatively…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-03-03 Xiao Li , Cristian-Ioan Vasile , Calin Belta

In reinforcement learning (RL), Q-learning is a fundamental algorithm whose convergence is guaranteed in the tabular setting. However, this convergence guarantee does not hold under linear function approximation. To overcome this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Hyukjun Yang , Han-Dong Lim , Donghwan Lee

The successes of reinforcement learning in recent years are underpinned by the characterization of suitable reward functions. However, in settings where such rewards are non-intuitive, difficult to define, or otherwise error-prone in their…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Mohammad Afzal , Sankalp Gambhir , Ashutosh Gupta , Krishna S , Ashutosh Trivedi , Alvaro Velasquez

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

In traditional statistical learning, data points are usually assumed to be independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) following an unknown probability distribution. This paper presents a contrasting viewpoint, perceiving data points…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Yangchen Pan , Junfeng Wen , Chenjun Xiao , Philip Torr

Federated learning (FL) has recently gained much attention due to its effectiveness in speeding up supervised learning tasks under communication and privacy constraints. However, whether similar speedups can be established for reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Nicolò Dal Fabbro , Aritra Mitra , George J. Pappas

Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms with neural network function parameterization have well-established empirical success in many practical large-scale reinforcement learning tasks. However, theoretical understanding of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Zhifa Ke , Zaiwen Wen , Junyu Zhang

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

Temporal difference (TD) methods constitute a class of methods for learning predictions in multi-step prediction problems, parameterized by a recency factor lambda. Currently the most important application of these methods is to temporal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2008-02-03 P. Cichosz