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We introduce the lookahead-bounded Q-learning (LBQL) algorithm, a new, provably convergent variant of Q-learning that seeks to improve the performance of standard Q-learning in stochastic environments through the use of ``lookahead'' upper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Ibrahim El Shar , Daniel R. Jiang

A striking property of transformers is their ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), a machine learning framework in which the learner is presented with a novel context during inference implicitly through some data, and tasked with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Liam Collins , Advait Parulekar , Aryan Mokhtari , Sujay Sanghavi , Sanjay Shakkottai

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to mitigate unsafe behaviors that arise from exploration during training by reducing constraint violations while maintaining task performance. Existing approaches typically rely on a single policy to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Murad Dawood , Usama Ahmed Siddiquie , Shahram Khorshidi , Maren Bennewitz

This paper studies safe Reinforcement Learning (safe RL) with linear function approximation and under hard instantaneous constraints where unsafe actions must be avoided at each step. Existing studies have considered safe RL with hard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-25 Honghao Wei , Xin Liu , Lei Ying

Many sequential decision problems involve finding a policy that maximizes total reward while obeying safety constraints. Although much recent research has focused on the development of safe reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Nolan Wagener , Byron Boots , Ching-An Cheng

In-context learning (ICL) is the ability of a model to learn a new task by observing a few exemplars in its context. While prevalent in NLP, this capability has recently also been observed in Reinforcement Learning (RL) settings. Prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Thomas Schmied , Fabian Paischer , Vihang Patil , Markus Hofmarcher , Razvan Pascanu , Sepp Hochreiter

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has demonstrated impressive performance in various gaming simulators and real-world applications. In practice, however, a DRL agent may receive faulty observation by abrupt interferences such as black-out,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-26 Chao-Han Huck Yang , I-Te Danny Hung , Yi Ouyang , Pin-Yu Chen

Recently, Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable progress with the emergence of various algorithms and datasets. However, these methods usually focus on algorithmic advancements, ignoring that many low-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Bingyi Kang , Xiao Ma , Yirui Wang , Yang Yue , Shuicheng Yan

While Reinforcement Learning ( RL) has made great strides towards solving increasingly complicated problems, many algorithms are still brittle to even slight environmental changes. Contextual Reinforcement Learning (cRL) provides a…

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to learn a reward function and a corresponding policy that best fit the demonstrated trajectories of an expert. However, current IRL works cannot learn incrementally from an ongoing trajectory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Shicheng Liu , Minghui Zhu

The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) usage has highlighted the importance of gradient-free in-context learning (ICL). However, interpreting their inner workings remains challenging. This paper introduces a novel multimodal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-26 Yosuke Miyanishi , Minh Le Nguyen

Training-time safety violations have been a major concern when we deploy reinforcement learning algorithms in the real world. This paper explores the possibility of safe RL algorithms with zero training-time safety violations in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-14 Yuping Luo , Tengyu Ma

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We introduce Shielded RecRL, a reinforcement learning approach to generate personalized explanations for recommender systems without sacrificing the system's original ranking performance. Unlike prior RLHF-based recommender methods that…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Ansh Tiwari , Ayush Chauhan

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) suffers from exploration inefficiency, where models struggle to generate successful rollouts, resulting in minimal learning signal. This challenge is particularly severe for tasks that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Saaket Agashe , Jayanth Srinivasa , Gaowen Liu , Ramana Kompella , Xin Eric Wang

Offline meta reinforcement learning (OMRL) has emerged as a promising approach for interaction avoidance and strong generalization performance by leveraging pre-collected data and meta-learning techniques. Previous context-based approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Hai Zhang , Boyuan Zheng , Tianying Ji , Jinhang Liu , Anqi Guo , Junqiao Zhao , Lanqing Li

In safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), safety cost is typically defined as a function dependent on the immediate state and actions. In practice, safety constraints can often be non-Markovian due to the insufficient fidelity of state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Siow Meng Low , Akshat Kumar

Advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown their effectiveness in multiple complicated natural language reasoning tasks. A key challenge remains in adapting these models efficiently to new or unfamiliar tasks. In-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Siqi Liang , Sumyeong Ahn , Jiayu Zhou

We study the Inverse Contextual Bandit (ICB) problem, in which a learner seeks to optimize a policy while an observer, who cannot access the learner's rewards and only observes actions, aims to recover the underlying problem parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Yuqi Kong , Xiao Zhang , Weiran Shen

The pretrain-finetuning paradigm in large-scale sequence models has made significant progress in natural language processing and computer vision tasks. However, such a paradigm is still hindered by several challenges in Reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Runji Lin , Ye Li , Xidong Feng , Zhaowei Zhang , Xian Hong Wu Fung , Haifeng Zhang , Jun Wang , Yali Du , Yaodong Yang