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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

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for decision-making in uncertain environments, but it often requires large amounts of data to learn an optimal policy. We address this challenge by incorporating prior model knowledge to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 J. S. van Hulst , W. P. M. H. Heemels , D. J. Antunes

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are designed to optimize problem-solving by learning actions that maximize rewards, a task that becomes particularly challenging in random and nonstationary environments. Even advanced RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Sebastian Zieglmeier , Niklas Erdmann , Narada D. Warakagoda

Large-scale autoregressive models pretrained on next-token prediction and finetuned with reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved unprecedented success on many problem domains. During RL, these models explore by generating new outputs, one…

Offline zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn agents that optimize unseen reward functions without additional environment interaction. The standard approach to this problem trains task-conditioned policies by sampling task…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Nazim Bendib , Nicolas Perrin-Gilbert , Olivier Sigaud

Reinforcement Learning (RL) serves as a versatile framework for sequential decision-making, finding applications across diverse domains such as robotics, autonomous driving, recommendation systems, supply chain optimization, biology,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-26 Vaneet Aggarwal , Washim Uddin Mondal , Qinbo Bai

Designing a competent meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithm in terms of data usage remains a central challenge to be tackled for its successful real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a sample-efficient meta-RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Jaeuk Shin , Giho Kim , Howon Lee , Joonho Han , Insoon Yang

Efficient exploration is one of the main challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Most existing sample-efficient algorithms assume the existence of a single reward function during exploration. In many practical scenarios, however, there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Xuezhou Zhang , Yuzhe ma , Adish Singla

Many sequential decision-making problems that are currently automated, such as those in manufacturing or recommender systems, operate in an environment where there is either little uncertainty, or zero risk of catastrophe. As companies and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Marc Rigter

Model-based next state prediction and state value prediction are slow to converge. To address these challenges, we do the following: i) Instead of a neural network, we do model-based planning using a parallel memory retrieval system (which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-02 John Chong Min Tan , Mehul Motani

In reinforcement learning (RL), an autonomous agent learns to perform complex tasks by maximizing an exogenous reward signal while interacting with its environment. In real-world applications, test conditions may differ substantially from…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Matteo Turchetta , Andreas Krause , Sebastian Trimpe

Bayesian reinforcement learning (RL) offers a principled and elegant approach for sequential decision making under uncertainty. Most notably, Bayesian agents do not face an exploration/exploitation dilemma, a major pathology of frequentist…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Mattie Fellows , Brandon Kaplowitz , Christian Schroeder de Witt , Shimon Whiteson

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is widely seen as having the potential to be significantly more sample efficient than model-free RL. However, research in model-based RL has not been very standardized. It is fairly common for…

We compare the model-free reinforcement learning with the model-based approaches through the lens of the expressive power of neural networks for policies, $Q$-functions, and dynamics. We show, theoretically and empirically, that even for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-08 Kefan Dong , Yuping Luo , Tengyu Ma

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Lianghuan Huang , Sagnik Anupam , Insup Lee , Shuo Li , Osbert Bastani

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning (RL) with unbounded state space motivated by the classical problem of scheduling in a queueing network. Traditional policies as well as error metric that are designed for finite, bounded or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Devavrat Shah , Qiaomin Xie , Zhi Xu

Standard model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) approaches fit a transition model of the environment to all past experience, but this wastes model capacity on data that is irrelevant for policy improvement. We instead propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Yecheng Jason Ma , Kausik Sivakumar , Jason Yan , Osbert Bastani , Dinesh Jayaraman

Traditional control theory-based methods require tailored engineering for each system and constant fine-tuning. In power plant control, one often needs to obtain a precise representation of the system dynamics and carefully design the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-09-21 Yixuan Sun , Sami Khairy , Richard B. Vilim , Rui Hu , Akshay J. Dave

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully applied to control tasks associated with unmanned aerial vehicles and robotics. In recent years, safe RL has been proposed to allow the safe execution of RL algorithms in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Austin Coursey , Marcos Quinones-Grueiro , Gautam Biswas