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To date, distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) methods have exclusively focused on the discounted setting, where an agent aims to optimize a discounted sum of rewards over time. In this work, we extend distributional RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Juan Sebastian Rojas , Chi-Guhn Lee

Chaotic dynamical systems pose a fundamental challenge for Reinforcement Learning (RL): exponential sensitivity to initial conditions induces high-variance bootstrap targets and poorly conditioned gradient updates. Chaotic dynamics arise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 James Rudd-Jones , Mirco Musolesi , María Pérez-Ortiz

Standard approaches to goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) that rely on temporal-difference learning can be unstable and sample-inefficient due to bootstrapping. While recent work has explored contrastive and supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Franki Nguimatsia Tiofack , Fabian Schramm , Théotime Le Hellard , Justin Carpentier

Large language models can predict real-valued quantities from heterogeneous inputs such as text, code, and molecular strings, but most training objectives score each decoded floating-point number independently, improving point estimates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Jungsoo Park , Hyungjoo Chae , Ethan Mendes , Jay DeYoung , Varsha Kishore , Wei Xu , Alan Ritter

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to estimate the reward function of optimizing agents by observing their response (estimates or actions). This paper considers IRL when noisy estimates of the gradient of a reward function generated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Vikram Krishnamurthy , George Yin

In real scenarios, state observations that an agent observes may contain measurement errors or adversarial noises, misleading the agent to take suboptimal actions or even collapse while training. In this paper, we study the training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-23 Ke Sun , Yingnan Zhao , Shangling Jui , Linglong Kong

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Typical RL methods optimize under an overall sequence reward, which can lead to a suboptimal learning process. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Yanshi Li , Shaopan Xiong , Gengru Chen , Xiaoyang Li , Yijia Luo , Xingyuan Bu , Yingshui Tan , Wenbo Su , Bo Zheng

Distributional Reinforcement Learning (RL) maintains the entire probability distribution of the reward-to-go, i.e. the return, providing more learning signals that account for the uncertainty associated with policy performance, which may be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-24 Luchen Li , A. Aldo Faisal

Reinforcement learning usually uses the feedback rewards of environmental to train agents. But the rewards in the actual environment are sparse, and even some environments will not rewards. Most of the current methods are difficult to get…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-13 Kai Jiang , XiaoLong Qin

For over a decade, model-based reinforcement learning has been seen as a way to leverage control-based domain knowledge to improve the sample-efficiency of reinforcement learning agents. While model-based agents are conceptually appealing,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-28 Brandon Amos , Samuel Stanton , Denis Yarats , Andrew Gordon Wilson

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is a sample efficient technique to obtain control policies, yet unavoidable modeling errors often lead performance deterioration. The model in MBRL is often solely fitted to reconstruct dynamics,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Claas Voelcker , Victor Liao , Animesh Garg , Amir-massoud Farahmand

Stochastic convex optimization algorithms are the most popular way to train machine learning models on large-scale data. Scaling up the training process of these models is crucial, but the most popular algorithm, Stochastic Gradient Descent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-30 Ashok Cutkosky , Robert Busa-Fekete

In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement- learning algorithm consisting in a stochastic variance-reduced version of policy gradient for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Stochastic variance-reduced gradient (SVRG) methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-15 Matteo Papini , Damiano Binaghi , Giuseppe Canonaco , Matteo Pirotta , Marcello Restelli

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks where extrinsic rewards from environments are sparse or even totally disregarded. Significant advances based on intrinsic motivation show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Chenjia Bai , Peng Liu , Kaiyu Liu , Lingxiao Wang , Yingnan Zhao , Lei Han

This paper studies a distributed policy gradient in collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where agents over a communication network aim to find the optimal policy to maximize the average of all agents' local returns. Due…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Xiaoxiao Zhao , Jinlong Lei , Li Li , Jie Chen

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

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-04-29 Donghwan Lee , Jianghai Hu

Keeping risk under control is often more crucial than maximizing expected rewards in real-world decision-making situations, such as finance, robotics, autonomous driving, etc. The most natural choice of risk measures is variance, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Xiaoteng Ma , Shuai Ma , Li Xia , Qianchuan Zhao

Humans are able to accelerate their learning by selecting training materials that are the most informative and at the appropriate level of difficulty. We propose a framework for distributing deep learning in which one set of workers search…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-04-19 Guillaume Alain , Alex Lamb , Chinnadhurai Sankar , Aaron Courville , Yoshua Bengio

In reinforcement learning, temporal difference-based algorithms can be sample-inefficient: for instance, with sparse rewards, no learning occurs until a reward is observed. This can be remedied by learning richer objects, such as a model of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Léonard Blier , Corentin Tallec , Yann Ollivier

We consider the problem of learning a set of probability distributions from the empirical Bellman dynamics in distributional reinforcement learning (RL), a class of state-of-the-art methods that estimate the distribution, as opposed to only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-10 Thanh Tang Nguyen , Sunil Gupta , Svetha Venkatesh