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Related papers: Constrained Policy Improvement for Safe and Effici…

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Offline reinforcement learning requires reconciling two conflicting aims: learning a policy that improves over the behavior policy that collected the dataset, while at the same time minimizing the deviation from the behavior policy so as to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-13 Ilya Kostrikov , Ashvin Nair , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning algorithms describe how an agent can learn an optimal action policy in a sequential decision process, through repeated experience. In a given environment, the agent policy provides him some running and terminal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-03-24 Arthur Charpentier , Romuald Elie , Carl Remlinger

While reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promising performance, its sample complexity continues to be a substantial hurdle, restricting its broader application across a variety of domains. Imitation learning (IL) utilizes oracles to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Xuefeng Liu , Takuma Yoneda , Rick L. Stevens , Matthew R. Walter , Yuxin Chen

While Bayesian-based exploration often demonstrates superior empirical performance compared to bonus-based methods in model-based reinforcement learning (RL), its theoretical understanding remains limited for model-free settings. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 He Wang , Xingyu Xu , Yuejie Chi

Policy networks are a central feature of deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for continuous control, enabling the estimation and sampling of high-value actions. From the variational inference perspective on RL, policy networks, when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Joseph Marino , Alexandre Piché , Alessandro Davide Ialongo , Yisong Yue

The goal of robust constrained reinforcement learning (RL) is to optimize an agent's performance under the worst-case model uncertainty while satisfying safety or resource constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate that strong duality does…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Shaocong Ma , Ziyi Chen , Yi Zhou , Heng Huang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is challenged by the distributional shift between learning policies and datasets. To address this problem, existing works mainly focus on designing sophisticated algorithms to explicitly or implicitly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Yang Yue , Bingyi Kang , Xiao Ma , Zhongwen Xu , Gao Huang , Shuicheng Yan

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides a natural way to align RL agents' behavior with human desired outcomes, but is often restrained by costly human feedback. To improve feedback efficiency, most existing PbRL methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Xiao Hu , Jianxiong Li , Xianyuan Zhan , Qing-Shan Jia , Ya-Qin Zhang

Many of the challenges facing today's reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, such as robustness, generalization, transfer, and computational efficiency are closely related to compression. Prior work has convincingly argued why minimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-08 Benjamin Eysenbach , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Sergey Levine

This paper presents a constrained policy gradient algorithm. We introduce constraints for safe learning with the following steps. First, learning is slowed down (lazy learning) so that the episodic policy change can be computed with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-24 Balázs Varga , Balázs Kulcsár , Morteza Haghir Chehreghani

Recent studies have shown that deep reinforcement learning (DRL) policies are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which raise concerns about applications of DRL to safety-critical systems. In this work, we adopt a principled way and study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Chao Wang

This paper considers Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) in Batch Reinforcement Learning (Batch RL): from a fixed dataset and without direct access to the true environment, train a policy that is guaranteed to perform at least as well as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Romain Laroche , Paul Trichelair , Rémi Tachet des Combes

As the operations of autonomous systems generally affect simultaneously several users, it is crucial that their designs account for fairness considerations. In contrast to standard (deep) reinforcement learning (RL), we investigate the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-08-19 Umer Siddique , Paul Weng , Matthieu Zimmer

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has increasingly become the focus of the artificial intelligent research due to its wide real-world applications where the collection of data may be difficult, time-consuming, or costly. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-13 Chenyang Xi , Bo Tang , Jiajun Shen , Xinfu Liu , Feiyu Xiong , Xueying Li

Experience replay \citep{lin1993reinforcement, mnih2015human} is a widely used technique to achieve efficient use of data and improved performance in RL algorithms. In experience replay, past transitions are stored in a memory buffer and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-09 Liran Szlak , Ohad Shamir

We consider the problem of finding optimal policies for a Markov Decision Process with almost sure constraints on state transitions and action triplets. We define value and action-value functions that satisfy a barrier-based decomposition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Agustin Castellano , Juan Bazerque , Enrique Mallada

Existing studies on constrained reinforcement learning (RL) may obtain a well-performing policy in the training environment. However, when deployed in a real environment, it may easily violate constraints that were originally satisfied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Zhongchang Sun , Sihong He , Fei Miao , Shaofeng Zou

Solving tasks in Reinforcement Learning is no easy feat. As the goal of the agent is to maximize the accumulated reward, it often learns to exploit loopholes and misspecifications in the reward signal resulting in unwanted behavior. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Chen Tessler , Daniel J. Mankowitz , Shie Mannor

Residual Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular approach for adapting pretrained policies by learning a lightweight residual policy that provides corrective actions. While Residual RL is more sample-efficient than finetuning the entire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Lakshita Dodeja , Karl Schmeckpeper , Shivam Vats , Thomas Weng , Mingxi Jia , George Konidaris , Stefanie Tellex

We study the problem of Safe Policy Improvement (SPI) under constraints in the offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) setting. We consider the scenario where: (i) we have a dataset collected under a known baseline policy, (ii) multiple reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-01 Harsh Satija , Philip S. Thomas , Joelle Pineau , Romain Laroche