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We explore reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal policy in the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem. In particular, we consider the convergence of policy gradient methods in the setting of known and unknown parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Ben Hambly , Renyuan Xu , Huining Yang

Machine Learning models in real-world applications must continuously learn new tasks to adapt to shifts in the data-generating distribution. Yet, for Continual Learning (CL), models often struggle to balance learning new tasks (plasticity)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Luckeciano C. Melo , Alessandro Abate , Yarin Gal

This paper investigates the instability of Q-learning in continuous environments, a challenge frequently encountered by practitioners. Traditionally, this instability is attributed to bootstrapping and regression model errors. Using a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Philipp Wissmann , Daniel Hein , Steffen Udluft , Thomas Runkler

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) algorithms often rely on (forward) reinforcement learning or planning, over a given time horizon, to compute an approximately optimal policy for a hypothesized reward function; they then match this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Yiqing Xu , Finale Doshi-Velez , David Hsu

Deep reinforcement learning can learn effective policies for a wide range of tasks, but is notoriously difficult to use due to instability and sensitivity to hyperparameters. The reasons for this remain unclear. When using standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-17 Aviral Kumar , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine

We study the problem of temporal-difference-based policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. In particular, we analyse the use of a distributional reinforcement learning algorithm, quantile temporal-difference learning (QTD), for this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Mark Rowland , Yunhao Tang , Clare Lyle , Rémi Munos , Marc G. Bellemare , Will Dabney

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular and versatile paradigm to learn reward-maximizing policies with safety guarantees. Previous works tend to express the safety constraints in an expectation form due to the ease of implementation,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Chenglin Li , Guangchun Ruan , Hua Geng

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown outstanding performance on inducing effective action policies that maximize expected long-term return on many complex tasks. Much of DRL work has been focused on sequences of events with discrete…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-07 Yeo Jin Kim , Min Chi

Optimal control theory and machine learning techniques are combined to formulate and solve in closed form an optimal control formulation of online learning from supervised examples with regularization of the updates. The connections with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-12-15 Giorgio Gnecco , Alberto Bemporad , Marco Gori , Marcello Sanguineti

Effective offline RL methods require properly handling out-of-distribution actions. Implicit Q-learning (IQL) addresses this by training a Q-function using only dataset actions through a modified Bellman backup. However, it is unclear which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Philippe Hansen-Estruch , Ilya Kostrikov , Michael Janner , Jakub Grudzien Kuba , Sergey Levine

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

Score-based and flow-based generative models exhibit remarkable expressive capacity in capturing complex distributions, and have been extensively deployed in tasks ranging from image generation to reinforcement learning. Nevertheless, these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yiyan , Liang , Sifei Liu , Weitong Zhang

Online interactions with the environment to collect data samples for training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent is not always feasible due to economic and safety concerns. The goal of Offline Reinforcement Learning is to address this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-05 Chi Zhang , Sanmukh Rao Kuppannagari , Viktor K Prasanna

We propose and analyze an alternate approach to off-policy multi-step temporal difference learning, in which off-policy returns are corrected with the current Q-function in terms of rewards, rather than with the target policy in terms of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-08-12 Anna Harutyunyan , Marc G. Bellemare , Tom Stepleton , Remi Munos

Constraint-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) involves policy constraints or imposing penalties on the value function to mitigate overestimation errors caused by distributional shift. This paper focuses on a limitation in existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Junghyuk Yeom , Yonghyeon Jo , Jungmo Kim , Sanghyeon Lee , Seungyul Han

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

We study online reinforcement learning for finite-horizon deterministic control systems with {\it arbitrary} state and action spaces. Suppose that the transition dynamics and reward function is unknown, but the state and action space is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-07 Lin F. Yang , Chengzhuo Ni , Mengdi Wang

Value-based reinforcement learning (RL) can in principle learn effective policies for a wide range of multi-turn problems, from games to dialogue to robotic control, including via offline RL from static previously collected datasets.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Joey Hong , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine

In Reinforcement Learning the Q-learning algorithm provably converges to the optimal solution. However, as others have demonstrated, Q-learning can also overestimate the values and thereby spend too long exploring unhelpful states. Double…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-16 David Barber

Medical treatments often involve a sequence of decisions, each informed by previous outcomes. This process closely aligns with reinforcement learning (RL), a framework for optimizing sequential decisions to maximize cumulative rewards under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Ali Shirali , Alexander Schubert , Ahmed Alaa