arXiv:2604. 13213v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Rare events such as conformational changes in biomolecules, phase transitions, and chemical reactions are central to the behavior of many physical systems, yet they are extremely difficult to study computationally because unbiased simulations seldom produce them.
arXiv:2608. 13800v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transition path sampling (TPS) aims to efficiently generate rare molecular transition trajectories between metastable states and is essential for understanding biomolecular mechanisms.
Limiting‑Kernel Q(λ) (LKQL) is an off‑policy value estimator that blends n‑step truncation with a long‑horizon approximation based on the limiting kernel. It maintains the computational efficiency of n‑step methods while improving policy evaluation accuracy, especially for long‑horizon tasks. The authors prove faster convergence of LKQL’s operator under aperiodicity and near‑on‑policy conditions, and demonstrate empirical gains on MuJoCo continuous‑control benchmarks.
arXiv:2604. 08580v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reward fine-tuning of diffusion and flow models and sampling from tilted or Boltzmann distributions can both be formulated as stochastic optimal control (SOC) problems, where learning an optimal generative dynamics corresponds to optimizing a control under SDE constraints.
In value-based reinforcement learning, improving the accuracy of policy evaluation has been shown to improve downstream policy optimization performance. The widely adopted family of approximations rel...
arXiv:2511.08097v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider a general infinite horizon Heterogeneous Restless multi-armed Bandit (RMAB). Heterogeneity is a fundamental problem for many real...
arXiv:2608. 10777v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linear Quadratic Stochastic Optimal Control (LQ-SOC) establishes a fundamental framework for steering noisy dynamical systems and has recently gained renewed interest in the machine learning community.
The paper introduces a model‑free continuous‑time reinforcement learning algorithm that learns from a fixed batch of discrete‑time off‑policy data. It builds on the PhiBE‑Q framework to create a PhiBE‑PI policy iteration that uses a single state‑action critic, avoiding explicit drift or diffusion estimation. The authors provide a local end‑to‑end suboptimality guarantee under linear function approximation, analyze error propagation from discretization, function approximation, and finite samples, and reveal a bias‑variance trade‑off where finer time discretization can worsen statistical error.
arXiv:2602. 00781v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online reinforcement learning in non-episodic, finite-horizon MDPs remains underexplored and is challenged by the need to estimate returns to a fixed terminal time.
arXiv:2610. 13901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the last iterate of standard asynchronous Q-learning from a single trajectory of a finite Markov decision process.
arXiv:2608. 01917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discounted exponential utility provides a principled criterion for risk-sensitive sequential decision-making, but its nonlinear structure complicates reinforcement learning.
The paper introduces reinforcement learning for Continuous-Time Jump Markov Decision Processes (CTJMDPs) with general discrete state spaces and continuous/discrete actions. It develops entropy‑regularized continuous‑time control and establishes theoretical foundations for q‑learning in this setting, providing model‑free algorithms that outperform naive discretization. Numerical tests on network dynamic pricing demonstrate the method’s ability to learn near‑optimal policies and scale to large networks.