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We present a novel theoretical framework, Q-MMR, for off-policy evaluation in finite-horizon MDPs. Q-MMR learns a set of scalar weights, one for each data point, such that the reweighted rewards approximate the expected return under the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Xiang Li , Nan Jiang

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in specific offline decision-making scenarios, yet its theoretical guarantees are still under development. Existing works on offline RL theory primarily emphasize a few trivial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Di Wu , Yuling Jiao , Li Shen , Haizhao Yang , Xiliang Lu

Low-complexity models such as linear function representation play a pivotal role in enabling sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL). The current paper pertains to a scenario with value-based linear representation, which postulates the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Gen Li , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi , Yuantao Gu , Yuting Wei

Regularized Markov Decision Processes serve as models of sequential decision making under uncertainty wherein the decision maker has limited information processing capacity and/or aversion to model ambiguity. With functional approximation,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Jiachen Xi , Alfredo Garcia , Petar Momcilovic

Effectively leveraging large, previously collected datasets in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key challenge for large-scale real-world applications. Offline RL algorithms promise to learn effective policies from previously-collected,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-20 Aviral Kumar , Aurick Zhou , George Tucker , Sergey Levine

We study the regret of reinforcement learning from offline data generated by a fixed behavior policy in an infinite-horizon discounted Markov decision process (MDP). While existing analyses of common approaches, such as fitted $Q$-iteration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Yichun Hu , Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

$Q$-learning is one of the most fundamental reinforcement learning algorithms. It is widely believed that $Q$-learning with linear function approximation (i.e., linear $Q$-learning) suffers from possible divergence until the recent work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Xinyu Liu , Zixuan Xie , Shangtong Zhang

This paper investigates the computational complexity of reinforcement learning in a novel linear function approximation regime, termed partial $q^{\pi}$-realizability. In this framework, the objective is to learn an $\epsilon$-optimal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Shayan Karimi , Xiaoqi Tan

Fitted $Q$-evaluation (FQE) is a standard regression-based tool for off-policy evaluation, but existing stability guarantees often rely on Bellman completeness, a strong closure condition that can fail under function approximation. We study…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-11 Lars van der Laan , Nathan Kallus

The classical theory of reinforcement learning (RL) has focused on tabular and linear representations of value functions. Further progress hinges on combining RL with modern function approximators such as kernel functions and deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Zhuoran Yang , Chi Jin , Zhaoran Wang , Mengdi Wang , Michael I. Jordan

Recently, there has been remarkable progress in reinforcement learning (RL) with general function approximation. However, all these works only provide regret or sample complexity guarantees. It is still an open question if one can achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Yue Wu , Jiafan He , Quanquan Gu

In off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) tasks within reinforcement learning, Temporal Difference Learning(TD) and Fitted Q-Iteration (FQI) have traditionally been viewed as differing in the number of updates toward the target value function:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Zechen Wu , Amy Greenwald , Ronald Parr

Distributional reinforcement learning improves performance by capturing environmental stochasticity, but a comprehensive theoretical understanding of its effectiveness remains elusive. In addition, the intractable element of the infinite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Taehyun Cho , Seungyub Han , Seokhun Ju , Dohyeong Kim , Kyungjae Lee , Jungwoo Lee

Deep reinforcement learning excels in numerous large-scale practical applications. However, existing performance analyses ignores the unique characteristics of continuous-time control problems, is unable to directly estimate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Shuyu Yin , Qixuan Zhou , Fei Wen , Tao Luo

We study reinforcement learning under model misspecification, where we do not have access to the true environment but only to a reasonably close approximation to it. We address this problem by extending the framework of robust MDPs to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-10 Aurko Roy , Huan Xu , Sebastian Pokutta

Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) assumes the agents make decisions based on Markov decision processes (MDPs) with one-step transition models. In many real-world applications, such as energy management and stock investment, agents can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Chenbei Lu , Zaiwei Chen , Tongxin Li , Chenye Wu , Adam Wierman

Understanding generalization in reinforcement learning (RL) is a significant challenge, as many common assumptions of traditional supervised learning theory do not apply. We focus on the special class of reparameterizable RL problems, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Huan Wang , Stephan Zheng , Caiming Xiong , Richard Socher

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

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) works impressively in some environments and fails catastrophically in others. Ideally, RL theory should be able to provide an understanding of why this is, i.e. bounds predictive of practical performance.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-15 Cassidy Laidlaw , Stuart Russell , Anca Dragan

Balancing exploration and exploitation is crucial in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we study model-based posterior sampling for reinforcement learning (PSRL) in continuous state-action spaces theoretically and empirically.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-18 Ying Fan , Yifei Ming