arXiv:2606. 19134v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Pareto Q-Learning with Reward Machines (PQLRM), a multi-objective reinforcement learning algorithm for tasks whose reward structure is specified by a set of reward machines (RMs).
arXiv:2606. 26397v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world decision-making often requires balancing multiple conflicting objectives, a challenge that standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) frequently addresses by aggregating rewards into a single scalar signal.
arXiv:2606. 18111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fairness is an important aspect of decision-making in multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL), where policies must ensure both optimality and equity across multiple, potentially conflicting objectives.
arXiv:2608. 02826v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning is a subfield of machine learning that studies how an agent interacts with an environment in order to extract as large a reward as possible.
arXiv:2607. 28916v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multistep credit assignment is critical for sample-efficient reinforcement learning, yet managing off-policy bias in Q-learning remains a fundamental challenge.
The paper introduces Reward Stimulation Implicit Q-Learning (RSIQL), a non-hierarchical approach to improve offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning. RSIQL adds auxiliary reward signals at intermediate states that are predicted to aid progress toward the goal, thereby reducing the delay in training supervision. Experiments on D4RL goal-reaching benchmarks and OGBench demonstrate that RSIQL outperforms baseline goal-conditioned IQL and rivals hierarchical offline methods while maintaining a simple flat policy structure.
The paper introduces a framework for combining large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) by treating the LLM as a planner and the RL agent as a controller. It formalizes this hybrid setup as a Goal-Augmented Markov Decision Process and proves that using the LLM’s per‑state progress score as a bounded potential function preserves the optimal policy set, even if the LLM scores are inaccurate. The authors validate their theoretical result with numerical experiments on a small MDP, testing four potential configurations, including an adversarial case with a potential scaled twenty times the base reward.
arXiv:2601. 02754v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: With the rapid development of e-commerce, auto-bidding has become a key asset in optimizing advertising performance under diverse advertiser environments.
The paper introduces Q-Target Pretrained Transformers (QTPT), a method that replaces supervised behavior cloning with a Bellman-style Q‑target objective for in‑context reinforcement learning. QTPT retains the context‑conditioned Transformer architecture but learns to estimate action values using rewards and transitions from the context, rather than merely imitating offline actions. The authors provide theoretical analysis in stochastic linear bandits and finite‑horizon MDPs, demonstrating improved robustness to weak or suboptimal data, and empirically show gains over supervised pretraining on controlled RL benchmarks and extensions to D4RL Kitchen and AntMaze.
arXiv:2602. 03778v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tail-end risk measures such as static conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) are used in safety-critical applications to prevent rare, yet catastrophic events.
arXiv:2606. 29806v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Action-values are foundational to many control algorithms such as Q-learning.
arXiv:2602. 02710v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) is the method of choice for training models in setups where the objective function can only be evaluated by sampling from the model.
The paper introduces BUMEX, a reinforcement learning exploration strategy that leverages a set of prior models containing the true transition kernel and reward function. By optimizing over this model set, the method derives upper and lower bounds on the Q‑function to guide exploration, providing theoretical guarantees of convergence to the optimal policy. When the model set follows a bounded‑parameter MDP structure, the optimization becomes convex, enabling finite‑time convergence under mild assumptions and demonstrating accelerated learning in simulations.