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Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful tool for improving diffusion-based text-to-image models, but existing methods are largely limited to single-task optimization. Extending RL to multiple tasks is challenging: joint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Quanhao Li , Junqiu Yu , Kaixun Jiang , Yujie Wei , Zhen Xing , Pandeng Li , Ruihang Chu , Shiwei Zhang , Yu Liu , Zuxuan Wu

$Q$-learning with function approximation is one of the most popular methods in reinforcement learning. Though the idea of using function approximation was proposed at least 60 years ago, even in the simplest setup, i.e, approximating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Simon S. Du , Yuping Luo , Ruosong Wang , Hanrui Zhang

We present a non-asymptotic convergence analysis of $Q$-learning and actor-critic algorithms for robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) under contamination, total-variation (TV) distance, and Wasserstein uncertainty sets. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Yang Xu , Swetha Ganesh , Vaneet Aggarwal

Maximum entropy reinforcement learning (MaxEnt-RL) has become the standard approach to RL due to its beneficial exploration properties. Traditionally, policies are parameterized using Gaussian distributions, which significantly limits their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Onur Celik , Zechu Li , Denis Blessing , Ge Li , Daniel Palenicek , Jan Peters , Georgia Chalvatzaki , Gerhard Neumann

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been extensively employed in a wide range of decision-making problems, such as games and robotics. Recently, diffusion policies have shown strong potential in modeling multi-modal behaviors, enabling more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Ben Liu , Shunpeng Yang , Hua Chen

In many real world applications, reinforcement learning agents have to optimize multiple objectives while following certain rules or satisfying a list of constraints. Classical methods based on reward shaping, i.e. a weighted combination of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Gabriel Kalweit , Maria Huegle , Moritz Werling , Joschka Boedecker

We present an algorithm for learning an approximate action-value soft Q-function in the relative entropy regularised reinforcement learning setting, for which an optimal improved policy can be recovered in closed form. We use recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-06 Jonas Degrave , Abbas Abdolmaleki , Jost Tobias Springenberg , Nicolas Heess , Martin Riedmiller

We study an approximation method for partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with continuous spaces. Belief MDP reduction, which has been the standard approach to study POMDPs requires rigorous approximation methods for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-20 Ali Devran Kara , Erhan Bayraktar , Serdar Yuksel

Diffusion policies, widely adopted in decision-making scenarios such as robotics, gaming and autonomous driving, are capable of learning diverse skills from demonstration data due to their high representation power. However, the sub-optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Ningyuan Yang , Jiaxuan Gao , Feng Gao , Yi Wu , Chao Yu

Offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn an optimal policy using a previously collected static dataset, is an important paradigm of RL. Standard RL methods often perform poorly in this regime due to the function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-29 Zhendong Wang , Jonathan J Hunt , Mingyuan Zhou

Applying Q-learning to high-dimensional or continuous action spaces can be difficult due to the required maximization over the set of possible actions. Motivated by techniques from amortized inference, we replace the expensive maximization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-23 Tom Van de Wiele , David Warde-Farley , Andriy Mnih , Volodymyr Mnih

Diffusion policies have recently emerged as a powerful class of visuomotor controllers for robot manipulation, offering stable training and expressive multi-modal action modeling. However, existing approaches typically treat action…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Zezeng Li , Rui Yang , Ruochen Chen , ZhongXuan Luo , Liming Chen

We study the interplay between the data distribution and Q-learning-based algorithms with function approximation. We provide a unified theoretical and empirical analysis as to how different properties of the data distribution influence the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Pedro P. Santos , Diogo S. Carvalho , Alberto Sardinha , Francisco S. Melo

This paper studies the optimal dividend problem with a bounded payout rate in a partially observed regime-switching diffusion model, where, in practice, the market regime is unobserved and key model parameters are unknown. To address this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-29 Zhongqin Gao , Yan Lv , Jingmin He

Diffusion policies are a powerful paradigm for robotic control, but fine-tuning them with human preferences is fundamentally challenged by the multi-step structure of the denoising process. To overcome this, we introduce a Unified Markov…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Amitesh Vatsa , Zhixian Xie , Wanxin Jin

We introduce and analyze a form of variance-reduced $Q$-learning. For $\gamma$-discounted MDPs with finite state space $\mathcal{X}$ and action space $\mathcal{U}$, we prove that it yields an $\epsilon$-accurate estimate of the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-09 Martin J. Wainwright

Dynamic decision-making under distributional shifts is of fundamental interest in theory and applications of reinforcement learning: The distribution of the environment in which the data is collected can differ from that of the environment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Shengbo Wang , Nian Si , Jose Blanchet , Zhengyuan Zhou

Although in recent years reinforcement learning has become very popular the number of successful applications to different kinds of operations research problems is rather scarce. Reinforcement learning is based on the well-studied dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-03 Manuel Schneckenreither

Imitation learning, particularly Diffusion Policies based methods, has recently gained significant traction in embodied AI as a powerful approach to action policy generation. These models efficiently generate action policies by learning to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Haiyong Yu , Yanqiong Jin , Yonghao He , Wei Sui

This work proposes an approach that integrates reinforcement learning and model predictive control (MPC) to solve finite-horizon optimal control problems in mixed-logical dynamical systems efficiently. Optimization-based control of such…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-15 Caio Fabio Oliveira da Silva , Azita Dabiri , Bart De Schutter