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Deep reinforcement learning is an increasingly popular technique for synthesising policies to control an agent's interaction with its environment. There is also growing interest in formally verifying that such policies are correct and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Edoardo Bacci , David Parker

The $Q$-function is a central quantity in many Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for which RL agents behave following a (soft)-greedy policy w.r.t. to $Q$. It is a powerful tool that allows action selection without a model of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Nino Vieillard , Marcin Andrychowicz , Anton Raichuk , Olivier Pietquin , Matthieu Geist

Control policies, trained using the Deep Reinforcement Learning, have been recently shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks introducing even very small perturbations to the policy input. The attacks proposed so far have been designed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-02 Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

Imitation learning is a control design paradigm that seeks to learn a control policy reproducing demonstrations from expert agents. By substituting expert demonstrations for optimal behaviours, the same paradigm leads to the design of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-20 Dharmesh Tailor , Dario Izzo

We present a novel framework for solving Dynamic Job Shop Scheduling Problems under uncertainty, addressing the challenges introduced by stochastic job arrivals and unexpected machine breakdowns. Our approach follows a model-based paradigm,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Sofiene Lassoued , Stefan Lier , Andreas Schwung

In real-life scenarios, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent aiming to maximise their reward, must often also behave in a safe manner, including at training time. Thus, much attention in recent years has been given to Safe RL, where an agent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-26 Edwin Hamel-De le Court , Francesco Belardinelli , Alexander W. Goodall

This paper presents a systematic study on gap-dependent sample complexity in offline reinforcement learning. Prior work showed when the density ratio between an optimal policy and the behavior policy is upper bounded (the optimal policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-05 Xinqi Wang , Qiwen Cui , Simon S. Du

Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-21 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

In reinforcement learning, we typically refer to unsupervised pre-training when we aim to pre-train a policy without a priori access to the task specification, i.e. rewards, to be later employed for efficient learning of downstream tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Riccardo Zamboni , Mirco Mutti , Marcello Restelli

Recent results in supervised learning suggest that while overparameterized models have the capacity to overfit, they in fact generalize quite well. We ask whether the same phenomenon occurs for offline contextual bandits. Our results are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-17 David Brandfonbrener , William F. Whitney , Rajesh Ranganath , Joan Bruna

The policy gradient theorem is defined based on an objective with respect to the initial distribution over states. In the discounted case, this results in policies that are optimal for one distribution over initial states, but may not be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-12 Riashat Islam , Raihan Seraj , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Doina Precup

Safe reinforcement learning (Safe RL) aims to ensure policy performance while satisfying safety constraints. However, most existing Safe RL methods assume benign environments, making them vulnerable to adversarial perturbations commonly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Jialiang Fan , Shixiong Jiang , Mengyu Liu , Fanxin Kong

We make three contributions toward better understanding policy gradient methods in the tabular setting. First, we show that with the true gradient, policy gradient with a softmax parametrization converges at a $O(1/t)$ rate, with constants…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Jincheng Mei , Chenjun Xiao , Csaba Szepesvari , Dale Schuurmans

Compared to on-policy counterparts, off-policy model-free deep reinforcement learning can improve data efficiency by repeatedly using the previously gathered data. However, off-policy learning becomes challenging when the discrepancy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-27 Baturay Saglam , Dogan C. Cicek , Furkan B. Mutlu , Suleyman S. Kozat

We introduce Implicit Policy, a general class of expressive policies that can flexibly represent complex action distributions in reinforcement learning, with efficient algorithms to compute entropy regularized policy gradients. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-05 Yunhao Tang , Shipra Agrawal

Works on implicit regularization have studied gradient trajectories during the optimization process to explain why deep networks favor certain kinds of solutions over others. In deep linear networks, it has been shown that gradient descent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Dan Zhao

Maximum entropy reinforcement learning motivates agents to explore states and actions to maximize the entropy of some distribution, typically by providing additional intrinsic rewards proportional to that entropy function. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

Policy Gradient (PG) algorithms are among the best candidates for the much-anticipated applications of reinforcement learning to real-world control tasks, such as robotics. However, the trial-and-error nature of these methods poses safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Matteo Papini , Matteo Pirotta , Marcello Restelli

Entropy regularization is an important idea in reinforcement learning, with great success in recent algorithms like Soft Q Network (SQN) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC1). In this work, we extend this idea into the on-policy realm. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Jingbin Liu , Xinyang Gu , Shuai Liu

Policy gradient algorithms have driven many recent advancements in language model reasoning. An appealing property is their ability to learn from exploration on their own trajectories, a process crucial for fostering diverse and creative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Aleksei Petrenko , Ben Lipkin , Kevin Chen , Erik Wijmans , Marco Cusumano-Towner , Raja Giryes , Philipp Krähenbühl