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Despite advances in hierarchical reinforcement learning, its applications to path planning in autonomous driving on highways are challenging. One reason is that conventional hierarchical reinforcement learning approaches are not amenable to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Jaehyun Kim , Jaeseung Jeong

Reinforcement learning (RL) techniques have been developed to optimize industrial cooling systems, offering substantial energy savings compared to traditional heuristic policies. A major challenge in industrial control involves learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 William Wong , Praneet Dutta , Octavian Voicu , Yuri Chervonyi , Cosmin Paduraru , Jerry Luo

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a promising approach for teaching robots new behaviour. However, one of its main limitations is the need for carefully hand-coded reward signals by an expert. We argue that it is crucial to automate the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-08-09 Abdalkarim Mohtasib , Gerhard Neumann , Heriberto Cuayahuitl

Route planning is essential to mobile robot navigation problems. In recent years, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been applied to learning optimal planning policies in stochastic environments without prior knowledge. However, existing…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-04-21 Xi Lin , Paul Szenher , John D. Martin , Brendan Englot

To overcome the curse of dimensionality and curse of modeling in Dynamic Programming (DP) methods for solving classical Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are popular. In this paper, we consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-29 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

Tasks involving high-risk-high-return (HRHR) actions, such as obstacle crossing, often exhibit multimodal action distributions and stochastic returns. Most reinforcement learning (RL) methods assume unimodal Gaussian policies and rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Jundong Zhang , Yuhui Situ , Fanji Zhang , Rongji Deng , Tianqi Wei

Motion generation in cluttered, dense, and dynamic environments is a central topic in robotics, rendered as a multi-objective decision-making problem. Current approaches trade-off between safety and performance. On the one hand, reactive…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Kay Hansel , Julen Urain , Jan Peters , Georgia Chalvatzaki

We address the problem of learning hierarchical deep neural network policies for reinforcement learning. In contrast to methods that explicitly restrict or cripple lower layers of a hierarchy to force them to use higher-level modulating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-05 Tuomas Haarnoja , Kristian Hartikainen , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement Learning (RL) with rubric-based rewards has recently shown remarkable progress in enhancing general reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet still suffers from ineffective exploration confined to curent…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Wenjian Zhang , Kongcheng Zhang , Jiaxin Qi , Baisheng Lai , Jianqiang Huang

Learning effective policies for sparse objectives is a key challenge in Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). A common approach is to design task-related dense rewards to improve task learnability. While such rewards are easily interpreted,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-12 Hassam Sheikh , Shauharda Khadka , Santiago Miret , Somdeb Majumdar

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) enhances the scalability of decision-making in long-horizon tasks by introducing temporal abstraction through options-policies that span multiple timesteps. Despite its theoretical appeal, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Hemanath Arumugam , Falong Fan , Bo Liu

This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-17 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Dale Schuurmans

Online recommendation requires handling rapidly changing user preferences. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is gaining interest as an effective means of capturing users' dynamic interest during interactions with recommender systems.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Xiaocong Chen , Lina Yao , Xianzhi Wang , Julian McAuley

Resource allocation plays a critical role in minimizing cycle time and improving the efficiency of business processes. Recently, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as a powerful technique to optimize resource allocation policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Jeroen Middelhuis , Zaharah Bukhsh , Ivo Adan , Remco Dijkman

Although well-established in general reinforcement learning (RL), value-based methods are rarely explored in constrained RL (CRL) for their incapability of finding policies that can randomize among multiple actions. To apply value-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Tianchi Cai , Wenpeng Zhang , Lihong Gu , Xiaodong Zeng , Jinjie Gu

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

In constrained reinforcement learning (C-RL), an agent seeks to learn from the environment a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying minimum requirements in secondary cumulative reward constraints. Several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Tianqi Zheng , Pengcheng You , Enrique Mallada

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) addresses sequential decision-making problems where agents are required to achieve goals by maximizing the expected return while meeting domain-specific constraints. In this setting, policy-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Alessandro Montenegro , Leonardo Cesani , Marco Mussi , Matteo Papini , Alberto Maria Metelli

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

We consider the joint design and control of discrete-time stochastic dynamical systems over a finite time horizon. We formulate the problem as a multi-step optimization problem under uncertainty seeking to identify a system design and a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-07 Adrien Bolland , Ioannis Boukas , Mathias Berger , Damien Ernst