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Quantization is an effective technique to reduce the deployment cost of large language models (LLMs), and post-training quantization (PTQ) has been widely studied due to its efficiency. However, existing PTQ methods are limited by their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Qitao Tan , Xiaoying Song , Jin Lu , Guoming Li , Jun Liu , Lingzi Hong , Caiwen Ding , Jundong Li , Xiaoming Zhai , Shaoyi Huang , Wei Niu , Geng Yuan

It is well-known that information loss can occur in the classic and simple Q-learning algorithm. Entropy-based policy search methods were introduced to replace Q-learning and to design algorithms that are more robust against information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-29 Tung D. Nguyen , Kathryn E. Kasmarik , Hussein A. Abbass

The objective in this paper is to obtain fast converging reinforcement learning algorithms to approximate solutions to the problem of discounted cost optimal stopping in an irreducible, uniformly ergodic Markov chain, evolving on a compact…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-10-01 Shuhang Chen , Adithya M. Devraj , Ana Bušić , Sean P. Meyn

While Bayesian-based exploration often demonstrates superior empirical performance compared to bonus-based methods in model-based reinforcement learning (RL), its theoretical understanding remains limited for model-free settings. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 He Wang , Xingyu Xu , Yuejie Chi

Reinforcement learning (RL) has seen significant research and application results but often requires large amounts of training data. This paper proposes two data-efficient off-policy RL methods that use parametrized Q-learning. In these…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-04-09 J. S. van Hulst , W. P. M. H. Heemels , D. J. Antunes

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training is crucial for LLM alignment and reasoning, but existing policy-based methods, such as PPO and DPO, can fall short of fixing shortcuts inherited from pre-training. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Jin Peng Zhou , Kaiwen Wang , Jonathan Chang , Zhaolin Gao , Nathan Kallus , Kilian Q. Weinberger , Kianté Brantley , Wen Sun

We show that learning-rate schedules for large model training behave surprisingly similar to a performance bound from non-smooth convex optimization theory. We provide a bound for the constant schedule with linear cooldown; in particular,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Fabian Schaipp , Alexander Hägele , Adrien Taylor , Umut Simsekli , Francis Bach

We study a Q learning algorithm for continuous time stochastic control problems. The proposed algorithm uses the sampled state process by discretizing the state and control action spaces under piece-wise constant control processes. We show…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-10 Erhan Bayraktar , Ali Devran Kara

Flow $Q$-learning has recently been introduced to integrate learning from expert demonstrations into an actor-critic structure. Central to this innovation is the ``the one-step policy'' network, which is optimized through a $Q$-function…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-17 Farnaz Adib Yaghmaie , Arunava Naha

Temporal-Difference (TD) learning methods, such as Q-Learning, have proven effective at learning a policy to perform control tasks. One issue with methods like Q-Learning is that the value update introduces bias when predicting the TD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Litian Liang , Yaosheng Xu , Stephen McAleer , Dailin Hu , Alexander Ihler , Pieter Abbeel , Roy Fox

Knowledge tracing (KT) models, e.g., the deep knowledge tracing (DKT) model, track an individual learner's acquisition of skills over time by examining the learner's performance on questions related to those skills. A practical limitation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-27 Shashank Sonkar , Andrew E. Waters , Andrew S. Lan , Phillip J. Grimaldi , Richard G. Baraniuk

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) is to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. In this paper, we focus on model-free robust RL, where the uncertainty set is defined to be centering at a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou

Reinforcement learning (RL) for continuous control often requires large amounts of online interaction data. Value-based RL methods can mitigate this burden by offering relatively high sample efficiency. Some studies further enhance sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Jijia Liu , Feng Gao , Qingmin Liao , Chao Yu , Yu Wang

Q-learning is widely used algorithm in reinforcement learning community. Under the lookup table setting, its convergence is well established. However, its behavior is known to be unstable with the linear function approximation case. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Han-Dong Lim , Donghwan Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) for complex tasks remains a challenge, primarily due to the difficulties of engineering scalar reward functions and the inherent inefficiency of training models from scratch. Instead, it would be better to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Finn Rietz , Erik Schaffernicht , Stefan Heinrich , Johannes Andreas Stork

Off-policy, value-based reinforcement learning methods such as Q-learning are appealing because they can learn from arbitrary experience, including data collected by older policies or other agents. In practice, however, bootstrapping makes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Armaan A. Abraham , Lucy Xiaoyang Shi , Chelsea Finn

$Q$-learning is one of the most fundamental reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Despite its widespread success in various applications, it is prone to overestimation bias in the $Q$-learning update. To address this issue, double…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Hyunjun Na , Donghwan Lee

Quantization-aware training (QAT) is a leading technique for improving the accuracy of quantized neural networks. Previous work has shown that decomposing training into a full-precision (FP) phase followed by a QAT phase yields superior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Aleksandr Dremov , David Grangier , Angelos Katharopoulos , Awni Hannun

In this paper, we derive rates of convergence in the high-dimensional central limit theorem for Polyak--Ruppert averaged iterates generated by entropy-regularized asynchronous Q-learning with linear function approximation and a polynomial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-19 Artemy Rubtsov , Rahul Singh , Eric Moulines , Alexey Naumov , Sergey Samsonov

In this work, we present a new model-free and off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm, that is capable of finding a near-optimal policy with state-action observations from arbitrary behavior policies. Our algorithm, called the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-21 Narim Jeong , Donghwan Lee , Niao He