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Reinforcement learning methods typically use Deep Neural Networks to approximate the value functions and policies underlying a Markov Decision Process. Unfortunately, DNN-based RL suffers from a lack of explainability of the resulting…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-05-19 Shambhuraj Sawant , Sebastien Gros

Reinforcement learning (RL) has gained increasing attraction in the academia and tech industry with launches to a variety of impactful applications and products. Although research is being actively conducted on many fronts (e.g., offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-13 Ruiyang Xu , Zhengxing Chen

Reinforcement Learning (RL) serves as a versatile framework for sequential decision-making, finding applications across diverse domains such as robotics, autonomous driving, recommendation systems, supply chain optimization, biology,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-26 Vaneet Aggarwal , Washim Uddin Mondal , Qinbo Bai

Combinatorial Optimisation problems arise in several application domains and are often formulated in terms of graphs. Many of these problems are NP-hard, but exact solutions are not always needed. Several heuristics have been developed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-23 David Ireland , Giovanni Montana

Many physical systems have underlying safety considerations that require that the policy employed ensures the satisfaction of a set of constraints. The analytical formulation usually takes the form of a Constrained Markov Decision Process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-03 Aria HasanzadeZonuzy , Archana Bura , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai

The design of good heuristics or approximation algorithms for NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems often requires significant specialized knowledge and trial-and-error. Can we automate this challenging, tedious process, and learn the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-23 Hanjun Dai , Elias B. Khalil , Yuyu Zhang , Bistra Dilkina , Le Song

Value-based methods play a fundamental role in Markov decision processes (MDPs) and reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we present a unified control-theoretic framework for analyzing valued-based methods such as value computation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-15 Xingang Guo , Bin Hu

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a well studied framework for solving sequential decision making problems under uncertainty. Exact methods for solving MDPs based on dynamic programming such as policy iteration and value iteration are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-09-09 Yanping Huang

Shifting from traditional control strategies to Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) for legged robots poses inherent challenges, especially when addressing real-world physical constraints during training. While high-fidelity simulations…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Joonho Lee , Lukas Schroth , Victor Klemm , Marko Bjelonic , Alexander Reske , Marco Hutter

Combinatorial optimisation problems framed as mixed integer linear programmes (MILPs) are ubiquitous across a range of real-world applications. The canonical branch-and-bound algorithm seeks to exactly solve MILPs by constructing a search…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Christopher W. F. Parsonson , Alexandre Laterre , Thomas D. Barrett

Recently, neural heuristics based on deep reinforcement learning have exhibited promise in solving multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems (MOCOPs). However, they are still struggling to achieve high learning efficiency and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Jinbiao Chen , Jiahai Wang , Zizhen Zhang , Zhiguang Cao , Te Ye , Siyuan Chen

Combinatorial optimization problems are notoriously challenging for neural networks, especially in the absence of labeled instances. This work proposes an unsupervised learning framework for CO problems on graphs that can provide integral…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Nikolaos Karalias , Andreas Loukas

Deep neural networks based on reinforcement learning (RL) for solving combinatorial optimization (CO) problems are developing rapidly and have shown a tendency to approach or even outperform traditional solvers. However, existing methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Chaoyang Wang , Pengzhi Cheng , Jingze Li , Weiwei Sun

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a transformative approach for aligning and enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs), addressing critical challenges in instruction following, ethical alignment, and reasoning capabilities. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Saksham Sahai Srivastava , Vaneet Aggarwal

Reinforcement Learning (RL) encompasses diverse paradigms, including model-based RL, policy-based RL, and value-based RL, each tailored to approximate the model, optimal policy, and optimal value function, respectively. This work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Guhao Feng , Han Zhong

Combinatorial optimization algorithms for graph problems are usually designed afresh for each new problem with careful attention by an expert to the problem structure. In this work, we develop a new framework to solve any combinatorial…

This thesis develops theoretical frameworks and algorithms that advance constrained reinforcement learning (RL) across control, preference learning, and alignment of large language models. The first contribution addresses constrained Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Akhil Agnihotri

To overcome the curse of dimensionality and curse of modeling in Dynamic Programming (DP) methods for solving classical Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are popular. In this paper, we consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-29 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

Reinforcement learning algorithms solve sequential decision-making problems in probabilistic environments by optimizing for long-term reward. The desire to use reinforcement learning in safety-critical settings inspires a recent line of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-12-17 Koundinya Vajjha , Avraham Shinnar , Vasily Pestun , Barry Trager , Nathan Fulton

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for neural combinatorial optimization, enabling models to learn heuristics that solve complex problems without requiring expert knowledge. Despite significant progress, existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Mingjun Pan , Guanquan Lin , You-Wei Luo , Bin Zhu , Zhien Dai , Lijun Sun , Chun Yuan