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The broader application of reinforcement learning (RL) is limited by challenges including data efficiency, generalization capability, and ability to learn in sparse-reward environments. Meta-learning has emerged as a promising approach to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Octavio Pappalardo , Rodrigo Ramele , Juan Miguel Santos

We study the problem of deployment efficient reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation under the \emph{reward-free} exploration setting. This is a well-motivated problem because deploying new policies is costly in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Dan Qiao , Yu-Xiang Wang

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous time and study the problem of achieving the best trade-off between exploration of a black box environment and exploitation of current knowledge. We propose an entropy-regularized reward…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-14 Haoran Wang , Thaleia Zariphopoulou , Xunyu Zhou

Demonstration is an appealing way for humans to provide assistance to reinforcement-learning agents. Most approaches in this area view demonstrations primarily as sources of behavioral bias. But in sparse-reward tasks, humans seem to treat…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-14 Lisa Torrey

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome-based rewards has proven effective for improving large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, its success often depends on the base model occasionally sampling correct solutions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jatin Prakash , Anirudh Buvanesh

Reinforcement learning is commonly applied in residential energy management, particularly for optimizing energy costs. However, RL agents often face challenges when dealing with deceptive and sparse rewards in the energy control domain,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Junlin Lu , Patrick Mannion , Karl Mason

Reinforcement learning (RL) in the real world necessitates the development of procedures that enable agents to explore without causing harm to themselves or others. The most successful solutions to the problem of safe RL leverage offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Alexander Quessy , Thomas Richardson , Sebastian East

Online model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods with continuous actions are playing a prominent role when dealing with real-world applications such as Robotics. However, when confronted to non-stationary environments, these methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-07 Mehdi Khamassi , Costas Tzafestas

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently proven great success in various domains. Yet, the design of the reward function requires detailed domain expertise and tedious fine-tuning to ensure that agents are able to learn the desired…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Murad Dawood , Nils Dengler , Jorge de Heuvel , Maren Bennewitz

While reinforcement learning (RL) has been successful in natural language processing (NLP) domains such as dialogue generation and text-based games, it typically faces the problem of sparse rewards that leads to slow or no convergence.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Ameet Deshpande , Eve Fleisig

Despite the numerous breakthroughs achieved with Reinforcement Learning (RL), solving environments with sparse rewards remains a challenging task that requires sophisticated exploration. Learning from Demonstrations (LfD) remedies this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Georgiy Pshikhachev , Dmitry Ivanov , Vladimir Egorov , Aleksei Shpilman

Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) aims to learn a policy solving a set of training tasks simultaneously and quickly adapting to new tasks. It requires massive amounts of data drawn from training tasks to infer the common structure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-21 Yijie Guo , Qiucheng Wu , Honglak Lee

In the era of deep reinforcement learning, making progress is more complex, as the collected experience must be compressed into a deep model for future exploitation and sampling. Many papers have shown that training a deep learning policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Glen Berseth

While reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to enable robots to autonomously acquire a wide range of skills, in practice, RL usually requires manual, per-task engineering of reward functions, especially in real world settings where…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-02-15 Tianhe Yu , Gleb Shevchuk , Dorsa Sadigh , Chelsea Finn

Efficient and effective exploration in continuous space is a central problem in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to autonomous driving. Skills learned from expert demonstrations or designed for specific tasks can benefit the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Tong Zhou , Letian Wang , Ruobing Chen , Wenshuo Wang , Yu Liu

Not having access to compact and meaningful representations is known to significantly increase the complexity of reinforcement learning (RL). For this reason, it can be useful to perform state representation learning (SRL) before tackling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-16 Astrid Merckling , Nicolas Perrin-Gilbert , Alex Coninx , Stéphane Doncieux

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework which is suitable for both the batch RL setting and the setting where there are many reward functions of interest. During the exploration phase, an agent collects samples without using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ruosong Wang , Simon S. Du , Lin F. Yang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Learning effective representations in image-based environments is crucial for sample efficient Reinforcement Learning (RL). Unfortunately, in RL, representation learning is confounded with the exploratory experience of the agent -- learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-21 Denis Yarats , Rob Fergus , Alessandro Lazaric , Lerrel Pinto

Although reinforcement learning has seen tremendous success recently, this kind of trial-and-error learning can be impractical or inefficient in complex environments. The use of demonstrations, on the other hand, enables agents to benefit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-29 Tongzhou Mu , Hao Su