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Many challenges arising in Quantum Technology can be successfully addressed using a set of machine learning algorithms collectively known as reinforcement learning (RL), based on adaptive decision-making through interaction with the quantum…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-01-28 Marin Bukov , Florian Marquardt

In real world settings, numerous constraints are present which are hard to specify mathematically. However, for the real world deployment of reinforcement learning (RL), it is critical that RL agents are aware of these constraints, so that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-24 Usman Anwar , Shehryar Malik , Alireza Aghasi , Ali Ahmed

Signal temporal logic (STL) is an expressive language to specify time-bound real-world robotic tasks and safety specifications. Recently, there has been an interest in learning optimal policies to satisfy STL specifications via…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Harish Venkataraman , Derya Aksaray , Peter Seiler

Reinforcement learning (RL) in healthcare has had mixed results, with reward sparsity, unreliable off-policy evaluation, and deployment-simulation gap as recurring failure modes. We argue that chronic disease management is structurally a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Prabhjot Singh , Abhishek Gupta , Chris Betz , Abe Flansburg , Brett Ives , Sudeep Lama , Jung Hoon Son

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods often require many trials before convergence, and no direct interpretability of trained policies is provided. In order to achieve fast convergence and interpretability for the policy in RL, we…

Effectively leveraging large, previously collected datasets in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key challenge for large-scale real-world applications. Offline RL algorithms promise to learn effective policies from previously-collected,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-20 Aviral Kumar , Aurick Zhou , George Tucker , Sergey Levine

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

Specifying a Reinforcement Learning (RL) task involves choosing a suitable planning horizon, which is typically modeled by a discount factor. It is known that applying RL algorithms with a lower discount factor can act as a regularizer,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-07 Ron Amit , Ron Meir , Kamil Ciosek

In this paper, we address two key challenges in deep reinforcement learning setting, sample inefficiency and slow learning, with a dual NN-driven learning approach. In the proposed approach, we use two deep NNs with independent…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-10-29 Krishnan Raghavan , Vignesh Narayanan , Jagannathan Sarangapani

Gradient descent or its variants are popular in training neural networks. However, in deep Q-learning with neural network approximation, a type of reinforcement learning, gradient descent (also known as Residual Gradient (RG)) is barely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Shuyu Yin , Tao Luo , Peilin Liu , Zhi-Qin John Xu

The goal of this paper is to study a distributed version of the gradient temporal-difference (GTD) learning algorithm for multi-agent Markov decision processes (MDPs). The temporal difference (TD) learning is a reinforcement learning (RL)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-08-23 Donghwan Lee , Hyungjin Yoon , Naira Hovakimyan

In this paper, we introduce proximal gradient temporal difference learning, which provides a principled way of designing and analyzing true stochastic gradient temporal difference learning algorithms. We show how gradient TD (GTD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Bo Liu , Ian Gemp , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Ji Liu , Sridhar Mahadevan , Marek Petrik

Regularized Markov Decision Processes serve as models of sequential decision making under uncertainty wherein the decision maker has limited information processing capacity and/or aversion to model ambiguity. With functional approximation,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Jiachen Xi , Alfredo Garcia , Petar Momcilovic

We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning, modeled by a Markov decision process. In this problem, the agents operate in a common environment under a fixed control policy, working together to discover the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-13 Thinh T. Doan , Siva Theja Maguluri , Justin Romberg

Full-sampling (e.g., Q-learning) and pure-expectation (e.g., Expected Sarsa) algorithms are efficient and frequently used techniques in reinforcement learning. Q$(\sigma,\lambda)$ is the first approach unifies them with eligibility trace…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-09 Long Yang , Yu Zhang , Qian Zheng , Pengfei Li , Gang Pan

This paper studies the robustness of reinforcement learning algorithms to errors in the learning process. Specifically, we revisit the benchmark problem of discrete-time linear quadratic regulation (LQR) and study the long-standing open…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-16 Bo Pang , Zhong-Ping Jiang

Test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for self-evolving large reasoning models (LRMs), enabling online adaptation on unlabeled test inputs via self-induced rewards through majority voting. However, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Ruotong Liao , Nikolai Röhrich , Xiaohan Wang , Yuhui Zhang , Yasaman Samadzadeh , Volker Tresp , Serena Yeung-Levy

Robust reinforcement learning (RRL) aims at seeking a robust policy to optimize the worst case performance over an uncertainty set of Markov decision processes (MDPs). This set contains some perturbed MDPs from a nominal MDP (N-MDP) that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Ukjo Hwang , Songnam Hong

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved significant success in solving single-goal tasks. However, uniform goal selection often results in sample inefficiency in multi-goal settings where agents must learn a universal goal-conditioned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera

Q-learning is a popular Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm which is widely used in practice with function approximation (Mnih et al., 2015). In contrast, existing theoretical results are pessimistic about Q-learning. For example, (Baird,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Naman Agarwal , Syomantak Chaudhuri , Prateek Jain , Dheeraj Nagaraj , Praneeth Netrapalli