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Related papers: Towards Formalizing Reinforcement Learning Theory

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Temporal-difference (TD) learning is an important field in reinforcement learning. Sarsa and Q-Learning are among the most used TD algorithms. The Q($\sigma$) algorithm (Sutton and Barto (2017)) unifies both. This paper extends the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-07 Markus Dumke

The growing literature of Federated Learning (FL) has recently inspired Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRL) to encourage multiple agents to federatively build a better decision-making policy without sharing raw trajectories. Despite its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Flint Xiaofeng Fan , Yining Ma , Zhongxiang Dai , Wei Jing , Cheston Tan , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated success in solving complex sequential decision-making problems by integrating neural networks with the RL framework. However, training deep RL models poses several challenges, such as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Sooraj Sathish , Keshav Goyal , Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become the de facto standard for tuning LLMs to solve tasks involving reasoning. However, growing evidence shows that models trained in such way often suffer from a significant loss in diversity. We argue…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Germán Kruszewski , Pierre Erbacher , Jos Rozen , Marc Dymetman

In this paper, we study the finite-sample statistical rates of distributional temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation. The aim of distributional TD learning is to estimate the return distribution of a discounted…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-14 Yang Peng , Kaicheng Jin , Liangyu Zhang , Zhihua Zhang

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

Temporal difference (TD) learning is a foundational algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). For nearly forty years, TD learning has served as a workhorse for applied RL as well as a building block for more complex and specialized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Hwanwoo Kim , Panos Toulis , Eric Laber

The classical theory of reinforcement learning (RL) has focused on tabular and linear representations of value functions. Further progress hinges on combining RL with modern function approximators such as kernel functions and deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Zhuoran Yang , Chi Jin , Zhaoran Wang , Mengdi Wang , Michael I. Jordan

Motivated by the prevailing paradigm of using unsupervised learning for efficient exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) problems [tang2017exploration,bellemare2016unifying], we investigate when this paradigm is provably efficient. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Fei Feng , Ruosong Wang , Wotao Yin , Simon S. Du , Lin F. Yang

Learning the value function of a given policy (target policy) from the data samples obtained from a different policy (behavior policy) is an important problem in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This problem is studied under the setting of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-14 Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Chandramouli Kamanchi , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Non-Markovian dynamics are commonly found in real-world environments due to long-range dependencies, partial observability, and memory effects. The Bellman equation that is the central pillar of Reinforcement learning (RL) becomes only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Zuyuan Zhang , Sizhe Tang , Tian Lan

We study reinforcement learning methods with linear function approximation under non-Markov state and cost processes. We first consider the policy evaluation method and show that the algorithm converges under suitable ergodicity conditions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Ali Devran Kara

This paper studies the control synthesis of motion planning subject to uncertainties. The uncertainties are considered in robot motions and environment properties, giving rise to the probabilistic labeled Markov decision process (PL-MDP). A…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Mingyu Cai , Shaoping Xiao , Zhijun Li , Zhen Kan

This paper studies satisfaction of temporal properties on unknown stochastic processes that have continuous state spaces. We show how reinforcement learning (RL) can be applied for computing policies that are finite-memory and deterministic…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-29 Milad Kazemi , Sadegh Soudjani

Stability issues with reinforcement learning methods persist. To better understand some of these stability and convergence issues involving deep reinforcement learning methods, we examine a simple linear quadratic example. We interpret the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Lingyi Yang

Because reinforcement learning suffers from a lack of scalability, online value (and Q-) function approximation has received increasing interest this last decade. This contribution introduces a novel approximation scheme, namely the Kalman…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-06-13 Matthieu Geist , Olivier Pietquin

We study the finite-time convergence of TD learning with linear function approximation under Markovian sampling. Existing proofs for this setting either assume a projection step in the algorithm to simplify the analysis, or require a fairly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Aritra Mitra

Reinforcement learning (RL) promises a framework for near-universal problem-solving. In practice however, RL algorithms are often tailored to specific benchmarks, relying on carefully tuned hyperparameters and algorithmic choices. Recently,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Scott Fujimoto , Pierluca D'Oro , Amy Zhang , Yuandong Tian , Michael Rabbat

Modern Reinforcement Learning (RL) is commonly applied to practical problems with an enormous number of states, where function approximation must be deployed to approximate either the value function or the policy. The introduction of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-09 Chi Jin , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Michael I. Jordan

In many real-world applications, safety constraints for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are either unknown or not explicitly defined. We propose a framework that concurrently learns safety constraints and optimal RL policies in such…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-05-02 Lunet Yifru , Ali Baheri