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Related papers: Constrained Policy Improvement for Safe and Effici…

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Behavior constrained policy optimization has been demonstrated to be a successful paradigm for tackling Offline Reinforcement Learning. By exploiting historical transitions, a policy is trained to maximize a learned value function while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Jiachen Li , Edwin Zhang , Ming Yin , Qinxun Bai , Yu-Xiang Wang , William Yang Wang

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to maximize the return while adhering to predefined constraint limits, which represent domain-specific safety requirements. In continuous control settings, where learning agents govern system…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Somnath Hazra , Pallab Dasgupta , Soumyajit Dey

The goal of robust reinforcement learning (RL) is to learn a policy that is robust against the uncertainty in model parameters. Parameter uncertainty commonly occurs in many real-world RL applications due to simulator modeling errors,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Kishan Panaganti , Zaiyan Xu , Dileep Kalathil , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

Constrained reinforcement learning has achieved promising progress in safety-critical fields where both rewards and constraints are considered. However, constrained reinforcement learning methods face challenges in striking the right…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Jianmina Ma , Jingtian Ji , Yue Gao

Reinforcement learning (RL) requires skillful definition and remarkable computational efforts to solve optimization and control problems, which could impair its prospect. Introducing human guidance into reinforcement learning is a promising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-30 Jingda Wu , Zhiyu Huang , Wenhui Huang , Chen Lv

We study computationally and statistically efficient reinforcement learning under the linear $Q^{\pi}$ realizability assumption, where any policy's $Q$-function is linear in a given state-action feature representation. Prior methods in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yijing Ke , Zihan Zhang , Ruosong Wang

The famous Policy Iteration algorithm alternates between policy improvement and policy evaluation. Implementations of this algorithm with several variants of the latter evaluation stage, e.g, $n$-step and trace-based returns, have been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-08-01 Yonathan Efroni , Gal Dalal , Bruno Scherrer , Shie Mannor

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Tsung-Yen Yang , Justinian Rosca , Karthik Narasimhan , Peter J. Ramadge

Reinforcement learning has been explored for many problems, from video games with deterministic environments to portfolio and operations management in which scenarios are stochastic; however, there have been few attempts to test these…

General Finance · Quantitative Finance 2024-02-19 Sherly Alfonso-Sánchez , Jesús Solano , Alejandro Correa-Bahnsen , Kristina P. Sendova , Cristián Bravo

Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a promising solution to enable evolutionary automated driving. However, the conventional RL method is always concerned with risk performance. The updated policy may not obtain a performance enhancement,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-17 Jia Hu , Xuerun Yan , Tian Xu , Haoran Wang

We study a class of constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which multiple constraint specifications are not identified before training. It is challenging to identify appropriate constraint specifications due to the undefined…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-02 Dongsheng Ding , Zhengyan Huan , Alejandro Ribeiro

We present an algorithm for local, regularized, policy improvement in reinforcement learning (RL) that allows us to formulate model-based and model-free variants in a single framework. Our algorithm can be interpreted as a natural extension…

We present an off-policy actor-critic algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that combines ideas from gradient-free optimization via stochastic search with learned action-value function. The result is a simple procedure consisting of…

Meta reinforcement learning (RL) allows agents to leverage experience across a distribution of tasks on which the agent can train at will, enabling faster learning of optimal policies on new test tasks. Despite its success in improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Tingting Ni , Maryam Kamgarpour

Reinforcement learning algorithms are commonly analyzed (and designed) under the Markov assumption. This is unrealistic, as most environments encountered in practice are either partially observable, or require function approximation that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Onno Eberhard , Claire Vernade , Michael Muehlebach

Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to align large language models (LLMs). Off-policy methods offer greater implementation simplicity and data efficiency than on-policy techniques, but often result in suboptimal performance. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Charles Arnal , Gaëtan Narozniak , Vivien Cabannes , Yunhao Tang , Julia Kempe , Remi Munos

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 a recent work, we proposed Reliable Policy Iteration (RPI), that restores policy iteration's monotonicity-of-value-estimates property to the function approximation setting. Here, we assess the robustness of RPI's empirical performance on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-16 S. R. Eshwar , Aniruddha Mukherjee , Kintan Saha , Krishna Agarwal , Gugan Thoppe , Aditya Gopalan , Gal Dalal

Real-world applications require RL algorithms to act safely. During learning process, it is likely that the agent executes sub-optimal actions that may lead to unsafe/poor states of the system. Exploration is particularly brittle in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-17 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob , Jérémie Mary

This paper presents the concept of an adaptive safe padding that forces Reinforcement Learning (RL) to synthesise optimal control policies while ensuring safety during the learning process. Policies are synthesised to satisfy a goal,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Mohammadhosein Hasanbeig , Alessandro Abate , Daniel Kroening