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Accurately assessing failure risk due to asset deterioration and/or extreme events is essential for efficient transportation asset management. Traditional risk assessment is conducted for individual assets by either focusing on the economic…
With the rapid advancement of large language models and vision-language models, employing large models as Web Agents has become essential for automated web interaction. However, training Web Agents with reinforcement learning faces critical…
Despite its experimental success, Model-based Reinforcement Learning still lacks a complete theoretical understanding. To this end, we analyze the error in the cumulative reward using a contraction approach. We consider both stochastic and…
Reinforcement learning (RL) and model predictive control (MPC) offer a wealth of distinct approaches for automatic decision-making under uncertainty. Given the impact both fields have had independently across numerous domains, there is…
Many existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods employ stochastic gradient iteration on the back end, whose stability hinges upon a hypothesis that the data-generating process mixes exponentially fast with a rate parameter that appears in…
Policy gradient (PG) is a reinforcement learning (RL) approach that optimizes a parameterized policy model for an expected return using gradient ascent. While PG can work well even in non-Markovian environments, it may encounter plateaus or…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a standard recipe for post-training LLMs on reasoning tasks, with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) emerging as a leading approach. However, GRPO and its variants are…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has the promise of providing data-driven support for decision-making in a wide range of problems in healthcare, education, business, and other domains. Classical RL methods focus on the mean of the total return…
This paper describes a purely data-driven solution to a class of sequential decision-making problems with a large number of concurrent online decisions, with applications to computing systems and operations research. We assume that while…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning has drawn increasing attention in practice, e.g., robotics and automatic driving, as it can explore optimal policies using samples generated by interacting with the environment. However, high reward…
Critic-free reinforcement learning methods, particularly group policies, have attracted considerable attention for their efficiency in complex tasks. However, these methods rely heavily on multiple sampling and comparisons within the policy…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective paradigm for enhancing model reasoning. However, existing RL methods like GRPO typically rely on unstructured self-sampling to fit scalar rewards, often producing inefficient rollouts…
Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has proven effective in RLVR by using outcome-based rewards. While fine-grained dense rewards can theoretically improve performance, we reveal that under practical sampling budgets, Monte Carlo…
Common cross-validation (CV) methods like k-fold cross-validation or Monte-Carlo cross-validation estimate the predictive performance of a learner by repeatedly training it on a large portion of the given data and testing on the remaining…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves multimodal reasoning by rewarding verifiable final answers. Yet answer-correct trajectories may still rely on incomplete derivations, weak evidence, or statements that…
We present the first finite-sample analysis of policy evaluation in robust average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Prior work in this setting have established only asymptotic convergence guarantees, leaving open the question of…
With the aim of improving performance in Markov Decision Problem in an Off-Policy setting, we suggest taking inspiration from what is done in Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL). In Offline RL, it is a common practice during policy learning…
Policy evaluation via Monte Carlo (MC) simulation is at the core of many MC Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms (e.g., policy gradient methods). In this context, the designer of the learning system specifies an interaction budget that…
In this work, we present Transitive Reinforcement Learning (TRL), a new value learning algorithm based on a divide-and-conquer paradigm. TRL is designed for offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) problems, where the aim is…
Policy-based reinforcement learning currently plays an important role in improving LLMs on mathematical reasoning tasks. However, existing rollout-based reinforcement learning methods (GRPO, DAPO, GSPO, etc.) fail to explicitly consider…