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We prove that, for finite-arm bandits with linear function approximation, the global convergence of policy gradient (PG) methods depends on inter-related properties between the policy update and the representation. textcolor{blue}{First},…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Jincheng Mei , Bo Dai , Alekh Agarwal , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Csaba Szepesvari , Dale Schuurmans

Reinforcement learning has shown strong performance in robotic manipulation, but learned policies often degrade in performance when test conditions differ from the training distribution. This limitation is especially important in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Shaifalee Saxena , Rafael Fierro , Alexander Scheinker

Policy-based algorithms are among the most widely adopted techniques in model-free RL, thanks to their strong theoretical groundings and good properties in continuous action spaces. Unfortunately, these methods require precise and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Luca Sabbioni , Francesco Corda , Marcello Restelli

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance in the face of uncertainties. In this paper, we focus on action robust RL with the probabilistic policy execution uncertainty, in which,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Guanlin Liu , Zhihan Zhou , Han Liu , Lifeng Lai

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms suffer from the dependency on accurately engineered reward functions to properly guide the learning agents to do the required tasks. Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) addresses that by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Youssef Abdelkareem , Shady Shehata , Fakhri Karray

In performative Reinforcement Learning (RL), an agent faces a policy-dependent environment: the reward and transition functions depend on the agent's policy. Prior work on performative RL has studied the convergence of repeated retraining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Vasilis Pollatos , Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic

Policy optimization is a core component of reinforcement learning (RL), and most existing RL methods directly optimize parameters of a policy based on maximizing the expected total reward, or its surrogate. Though often achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-10 Ruiyi Zhang , Changyou Chen , Chunyuan Li , Lawrence Carin

Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Alexander W. Goodall , Edwin Hamel-De le Court , Francesco Belardinelli

In recent years, fully differentiable rigid body physics simulators have been developed, which can be used to simulate a wide range of robotic systems. In the context of reinforcement learning for control, these simulators theoretically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Sean Gillen , Katie Byl

In order to model risk aversion in reinforcement learning, an emerging line of research adapts familiar algorithms to optimize coherent risk functionals, a class that includes conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). Because optimizing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Audrey Huang , Liu Leqi , Zachary C. Lipton , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli

When applying reinforcement learning (RL) to a new problem, reward engineering is a necessary, but often difficult and error-prone task a system designer has to face. To avoid this step, we propose LR4GPM, a novel (deep) RL method that can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-17 Junqi Qian , Paul Weng , Chenmien Tan

Score-function based methods for policy learning, such as REINFORCE and PPO, have delivered strong results in game-playing and robotics, yet their high variance often undermines training stability. Using pathwise policy gradients, i.e.…

We consider deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) in the context of reinforcement learning with sparse rewards. To enhance exploration, we introduce a search procedure, \emph{${\epsilon}{t}$-greedy}, which generates exploratory options…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Ehsan Futuhi , Shayan Karimi , Chao Gao , Martin Müller

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) methods for finding optimal policies in linear quadratic (LQ) mean field control (MFC) problems over an infinite horizon in continuous time, with common noise and entropy regularization. We study…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-06 Noufel Frikha , Huyên Pham , Xuanye Song

We study the problem of efficiently estimating policies that simultaneously optimize multiple objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). Given $n$ objectives (or tasks), we seek the optimal partition of these objectives into $k \ll n$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Zhenshuo Zhang , Minxuan Duan , Youran Ye , Hongyang R. Zhang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has made significant strides in complex tasks but struggles in multi-task settings with different embodiments. World model methods offer scalability by learning a simulation of the environment but often rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Ignat Georgiev , Varun Giridhar , Nicklas Hansen , Animesh Garg

In long-horizon tasks, recent agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) face a significant challenge that sparse, outcome-based rewards make it difficult to assign credit to intermediate steps. Previous methods mainly focus on creating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Jiawei Wang , Jiacai Liu , Yuqian Fu , Yingru Li , Xintao Wang , Yuan Lin , Yu Yue , Lin Zhang , Yang Wang , Ke Wang

Policy gradient methods, which have been extensively studied in the last decade, offer an effective and efficient framework for reinforcement learning problems. However, their performances can often be unsatisfactory, suffering from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Shihab Ahmed , El Houcine Bergou , Aritra Dutta , Yue Wang

Entropy regularized algorithms such as Soft Q-learning and Soft Actor-Critic, recently showed state-of-the-art performance on a number of challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. The regularized formulation modifies the standard RL…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-15 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob

Entropy regularization is an efficient technique for encouraging exploration and preventing a premature convergence of (vanilla) policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning (RL). However, the theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Yuhao Ding , Junzi Zhang , Hyunin Lee , Javad Lavaei