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Value estimation is a critical component of the reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm. The question of how to effectively learn value predictors from data is one of the major problems studied by the RL community, and different approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-22 Arthur Guez , Fabio Viola , Théophane Weber , Lars Buesing , Steven Kapturowski , Doina Precup , David Silver , Nicolas Heess

Extrinsic rewards can effectively guide reinforcement learning (RL) agents in specific tasks. However, extrinsic rewards frequently fall short in complex environments due to the significant human effort needed for their design and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Mingqi Yuan , Roger Creus Castanyer , Bo Li , Xin Jin , Wenjun Zeng , Glen Berseth

In this paper we consider the problem of how a reinforcement learning agent that is tasked with solving a sequence of reinforcement learning problems (a sequence of Markov decision processes) can use knowledge acquired early in its lifetime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-05 Francisco M. Garcia , Philip S. Thomas

In this paper, we study the problem of deceptive reinforcement learning to preserve the privacy of a reward function. Reinforcement learning is the problem of finding a behaviour policy based on rewards received from exploratory behaviour.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Zhengshang Liu , Yue Yang , Tim Miller , Peta Masters

Efficient exploration remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning, especially when an environment contains large state spaces, deceptive local optima, or sparse rewards. To tackle this problem, we present a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Zhang-Wei Hong , Tzu-Yun Shann , Shih-Yang Su , Yi-Hsiang Chang , Chun-Yi Lee

A common strategy in modern learning systems is to learn a representation that is useful for many tasks, a.k.a. representation learning. We study this strategy in the imitation learning setting for Markov decision processes (MDPs) where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Sanjeev Arora , Simon S. Du , Sham Kakade , Yuping Luo , Nikunj Saunshi

In this work, we evaluate the effectiveness of representation learning approaches for decision making in visually complex environments. Representation learning is essential for effective reinforcement learning (RL) from high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Jun Yamada , Karl Pertsch , Anisha Gunjal , Joseph J. Lim

We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Nadav Merlis

One major limitation to the applicability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to many practical domains is the large number of samples required to learn an optimal policy. To address this problem and improve learning efficiency, we consider a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-07 Roberto Cipollone , Giuseppe De Giacomo , Marco Favorito , Luca Iocchi , Fabio Patrizi

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved great success in solving complicated decision-making problems. Despite the successes, DRL is frequently criticized for many reasons, e.g., data inefficient, inflexible and intractable reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Weiqin Chen

There has been significant progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) in recent years. Nevertheless, finding suitable hyperparameter configurations and reward functions remains challenging even for experts, and performance heavily relies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Julian Dierkes , Emma Cramer , Holger H. Hoos , Sebastian Trimpe

Deep reinforcement learning agents are often misaligned, as they over-exploit early reward signals. Recently, several symbolic approaches have addressed these challenges by encoding sparse objectives along with aligned plans. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Zihan Ye , Phil Chau , Raban Emunds , Jannis Blüml , Cedric Derstroff , Quentin Delfosse , Oleg Arenz , Kristian Kersting

In several reinforcement learning (RL) scenarios, mainly in security settings, there may be adversaries trying to interfere with the reward generating process. In this paper, we introduce Threatened Markov Decision Processes (TMDPs), which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-28 Victor Gallego , Roi Naveiro , David Rios Insua

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) can help avoid sophisticated reward designs and align better with human intentions, showing great promise in various real-world applications. However, obtaining human feedback for preferences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Yiqin Yang , Hao Hu , Yihuan Mao , Jin Zhang , Chengjie Wu , Yuhua Jiang , Xu Yang , Runpeng Xie , Yi Fan , Bo Liu , Yang Gao , Bo Xu , Chongjie Zhang

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Philippe Morere , Gilad Francis , Tom Blau , Fabio Ramos

Deep reinforcement learning is a technique for solving problems in a variety of environments, ranging from Atari video games to stock trading. This method leverages deep neural network models to make decisions based on observations of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Anthony Dowling

Reinforcement learning (RL) -- algorithms that teach artificial agents to interact with environments by maximising reward signals -- has achieved significant success in recent years. These successes have been facilitated by advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Llewyn Salt , Marcus Gallagher

Several recent works have been dedicated to unsupervised reinforcement learning in a single environment, in which a policy is first pre-trained with unsupervised interactions, and then fine-tuned towards the optimal policy for several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-17 Mirco Mutti , Mattia Mancassola , Marcello Restelli

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn an individual task. While in principle meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms enable agents to learn new skills from small amounts of experience,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-21 Kate Rakelly , Aurick Zhou , Deirdre Quillen , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

We introduce the forward-backward (FB) representation of the dynamics of a reward-free Markov decision process. It provides explicit near-optimal policies for any reward specified a posteriori. During an unsupervised phase, we use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-12 Ahmed Touati , Yann Ollivier