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Reinforcement Learning: An Overview

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Paper Summary

Paperzilla title
RL 101: A whirlwind tour of reinforcement learning.

This paper provides a high-level overview of reinforcement learning (RL), covering topics such as value-based and policy-based RL, model-based RL, multi-agent RL, and optimization problems. It uses a great deal of mathematical notation and assumes prior knowledge of ML concepts, which can be hard for non-experts to follow. Several real-world use cases are mentioned, but specific details are deferred to the references.

Explain Like I'm Five

Reinforcement learning lets computers learn how to make decisions in complex situations by trying different actions and seeing what works best. This overview explains the basic ideas.

Possible Conflicts of Interest

None identified

Identified Limitations

Too brief
It is too brief given the vast scope of RL.
Outdated
It lacks discussion of recent advances, such as those combining RL with LLMs.
Difficult for beginners
The overview is very dense and technical, making it hard for beginners to follow.

Rating Explanation

This overview is a useful resource, but it is too brief and technical for beginners and it has not been updated to reflect recent advances, which limits its usefulness.

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File Information

Original Title: Reinforcement Learning: An Overview
Uploaded: August 09, 2025 at 08:45 PM
Privacy: Public