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Impressive results in natural language processing (NLP) based on the Transformer neural network architecture have inspired researchers to explore viewing offline reinforcement learning (RL) as a generic sequence modeling problem. Recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-22 Adam Villaflor , Zhe Huang , Swapnil Pande , John Dolan , Jeff Schneider

While most approaches to the problem of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) focus on estimating a reward function that best explains an expert agent's policy or demonstrated behavior on a control task, it is often the case that such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-01 Dexter R. R. Scobee , S. Shankar Sastry

We design a simple reinforcement learning (RL) agent that implements an optimistic version of $Q$-learning and establish through regret analysis that this agent can operate with some level of competence in any environment. While we leverage…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Shi Dong , Benjamin Van Roy , Zhengyuan Zhou

We consider a class of reinforcement-learning systems in which the agent follows a behavior policy to explore a discrete state-action space to find an optimal policy while adhering to some restriction on its behavior. Such restriction may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-07 Peter C. Y. Chen

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) studies how to leverage environment statistics to learn useful behaviors without the cost of reward engineering. However, a central challenge in unsupervised RL is to extract behaviors that…

We investigate robust model-free reinforcement learning algorithms designed for environments that may be dynamic or even adversarial. Traditional state-based policies often struggle to accommodate the challenges imposed by the presence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Udaya Ghai , Arushi Gupta , Wenhan Xia , Karan Singh , Elad Hazan

We study non-rectangular robust Markov decision processes under the average-reward criterion, where the ambiguity set couples transition probabilities across states and the adversary commits to a stationary kernel for the entire horizon. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-11 Shengbo Wang , Nian Si

We study risk-sensitive RL where the goal is learn a history-dependent policy that optimizes some risk measure of cumulative rewards. We consider a family of risks called the optimized certainty equivalents (OCE), which captures important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Kaiwen Wang , Dawen Liang , Nathan Kallus , Wen Sun

Reinforcement Learning (RL), recognized as an efficient learning approach, has achieved remarkable success across multiple fields and applications, including gaming, robotics, and autonomous vehicles. Classical single-agent reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Jingpu Yang , Helin Wang , Qirui Zhao , Zhecheng Shi , Zirui Song , Miao Fang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a central optimisation framework in machine learning. Although RL agents can converge to optimal solutions, the definition of ``optimality'' depends on the environment's statistical properties. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Bert Verbruggen , Arne Vanhoyweghen , Vincent Ginis

We study a security threat to reinforcement learning where an attacker poisons the learning environment to force the agent into executing a target policy chosen by the attacker. As a victim, we consider RL agents whose objective is to find…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-20 Amin Rakhsha , Goran Radanovic , Rati Devidze , Xiaojin Zhu , Adish Singla

Offline Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) learns rewards and policies aligned with human preferences without the need for extensive reward engineering and direct interaction with human annotators. However, ensuring safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Ze Gong , Pradeep Varakantham , Akshat Kumar

Autoregressive processes naturally arise in a large variety of real-world scenarios, including stock markets, sales forecasting, weather prediction, advertising, and pricing. When facing a sequential decision-making problem in such a…

Learning Markov decision processes (MDPs) in the presence of the adversary is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we study RL in episodic MDPs with adversarial reward and full information feedback, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-21 Jiafan He , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

Recently, robust reinforcement learning (RL) methods against input observation have garnered significant attention and undergone rapid evolution due to RL's potential vulnerability. Although these advanced methods have achieved reasonable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Kosuke Nakanishi , Akihiro Kubo , Yuji Yasui , Shin Ishii

Reinforcement learning (RL) has revolutionized decision-making across a wide range of domains over the past few decades. Yet, deploying RL policies in real-world scenarios presents the crucial challenge of ensuring safety. Traditional safe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-03-26 Lunet Yifru , Ali Baheri

Reinforcement learning has demonstrated impressive performance in various challenging problems such as robotics, board games, and classical arcade games. However, its real-world applications can be hindered by the absence of robustness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Siemen Herremans , Ali Anwar , Siegfried Mercelis

A Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a popular model for reinforcement learning. However, its commonly used assumption of stationary dynamics and rewards is too stringent and fails to hold in adversarial, nonstationary, or multi-agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-22 Tiancheng Yu , Suvrit Sra

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown a promising performance in learning optimal policies for a variety of sequential decision-making tasks. However, in many real-world RL problems, besides optimizing the main objectives, the agent is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Ashkan B. Jeddi , Nariman L. Dehghani , Abdollah Shafieezadeh

Online safe reinforcement learning (RL) plays a key role in dynamic environments, with applications in autonomous driving, robotics, and cybersecurity. The objective is to learn optimal policies that maximize rewards while satisfying safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jiahui Zhu , Kihyun Yu , Dabeen Lee , Xin Liu , Honghao Wei