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Numerical time integration is fundamental to the simulation of initial and boundary value problems. Traditionally, time integration schemes require adaptive time-stepping to ensure computational speed and sufficient accuracy. Although these…

Computational Physics · Physics 2025-12-18 David Michael Riley , Alexandros Stathas , Diego Gutiérrez-Oribio , Ioannis Stefanou

We propose an automata-theoretic approach for reinforcement learning (RL) under complex spatio-temporal constraints with time windows. The problem is formulated using a Markov decision process under a bounded temporal logic constraint.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Xiaoshan Lin , Abbasali Koochakzadeh , Yasin Yazicioglu , Derya Aksaray

Achieving fast and stable off-policy learning in deep reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging. Most existing methods rely on semi-gradient temporal-difference (TD) methods for their simplicity and efficiency, but are consequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Esraa Elelimy , Brett Daley , Andrew Patterson , Marlos C. Machado , Adam White , Martha White

Despite the wide applications of Adam in reinforcement learning (RL), the theoretical convergence of Adam-type RL algorithms has not been established. This paper provides the first such convergence analysis for two fundamental RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Huaqing Xiong , Tengyu Xu , Yingbin Liang , Wei Zhang

Many real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems necessitate learning complex, temporally extended behavior that may only receive reward signal when the behavior is completed. If the reward-worthy behavior is known, it can be specified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Phillip J. K. Christoffersen , Andrew C. Li , Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Sheila A. McIlraith

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms that learn policies by trial-and-error must learn from limited amounts of data collected by actively interacting with the environment. While many prior works have shown that proper regularization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-21 Qiyang Li , Aviral Kumar , Ilya Kostrikov , Sergey Levine

In temporal difference (TD) learning, off-policy sampling is known to be more practical than on-policy sampling, and by decoupling learning from data collection, it enables data reuse. It is known that policy evaluation (including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Zaiwei Chen , Siva Theja Maguluri , Sanjay Shakkottai , Karthikeyan Shanmugam

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a useful paradigm for training policies that solve tasks involving complex motions, such as those encountered in robotic manipulation. In practice, the successful application of LfD requires overcoming…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Peter David Fagan , Subramanian Ramamoorthy

This paper studies the exponential stability of random matrix products driven by a general (possibly unbounded) state space Markov chain. It is a cornerstone in the analysis of stochastic algorithms in machine learning (e.g. for parameter…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-02-02 Alain Durmus , Eric Moulines , Alexey Naumov , Sergey Samsonov , Hoi-To Wai

Reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous state-action spaces remains challenging in scientific computing due to poor sample efficiency and lack of pathwise physical consistency. We introduce Differential Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Minh Nguyen , Chandrajit Bajaj

The key assumption underlying linear Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) is that the learner has access to a known feature map $\phi(x, a)$ that maps state-action pairs to $d$-dimensional vectors, and that the rewards and transitions are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-20 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra , Dhruv Rohatgi

Can an asset manager plan the optimal timing for her/his hedging strategies given market conditions? The standard approach based on Markowitz or other more or less sophisticated financial rules aims to find the best portfolio allocation…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2020-11-10 Eric Benhamou , David Saltiel , Sandrine Ungari , Abhishek Mukhopadhyay

This paper studies the continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL) for optimal switching problems across multiple regimes. We consider a type of exploratory formulation under entropy regularization where the agent randomizes both the timing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-23 Yijie Huang , Mengge Li , Xiang Yu , Zhou Zhou

Recently, \citet{SuttonMW15} introduced the emphatic temporal differences (ETD) algorithm for off-policy evaluation in Markov decision processes. In this short note, we show that the projected fixed-point equation that underlies ETD…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-08-25 Assaf Hallak , Aviv Tamar , Shie Mannor

Controlling high-dimensional stochastic systems, critical in robotics, autonomous vehicles, and hyperchaotic systems, faces the curse of dimensionality, lacks temporal abstraction, and often fails to ensure stochastic stability. To overcome…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Mohammad Ali Labbaf Khaniki , Fateme Taroodi , Benyamin Safizadeh

Single-domain offline reinforcement learning (RL) often suffers from limited data coverage, while cross-domain offline RL handles this issue by leveraging additional data from other domains with dynamics shifts. However, existing studies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Zhongjian Qiao , Rui Yang , Jiafei Lyu , Xiu Li , Zhongxiang Dai , Zhuoran Yang , Siyang Gao , Shuang Qiu

Reinforcement learning has been successful across several applications in which agents have to learn to act in environments with sparse feedback. However, despite this empirical success there is still a lack of theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-08 Blake Bordelon , Paul Masset , Henry Kuo , Cengiz Pehlevan

An algorithm is proposed for policy evaluation in Markov Decision Processes which gives good empirical results with respect to convergence rates. The algorithm tracks the Projected Bellman Error and is implemented as a true gradient based…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-01-21 Debangshu Banerjee , Kavita Wagh

We introduce a novel framework for analyzing reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous state-action spaces, and use it to prove fast rates of convergence in both off-line and on-line settings. Our analysis highlights two key stability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-11 Yaqi Duan , Martin J. Wainwright

We study online transfer reinforcement learning (RL) in episodic Markov decision processes, where experience from related source tasks is available during learning on a target task. A fundamental difficulty is that task similarity is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Elynn Chen , Enpei Zhang , Jinhang Chai , Yujun Yan