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Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models, yet how to explicitly steer training toward exploration or exploitation remains an open problem. We introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Wenlong Deng , Yi Ren , Yushu Li , Boying Gong , Danica J. Sutherland , Xiaoxiao Li , Christos Thrampoulidis

Finite-horizon lookahead policies are abundantly used in Reinforcement Learning and demonstrate impressive empirical success. Usually, the lookahead policies are implemented with specific planning methods such as Monte Carlo Tree Search…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Yonathan Efroni , Gal Dalal , Bruno Scherrer , Shie Mannor

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) frameworks like Option-Critic (OC) and Multi-updates Option Critic (MOC) have introduced significant advancements in learning reusable options. However, these methods underperform in multi-goal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Gabriel Romio , Mateus Begnini Melchiades , Bruno Castro da Silva , Gabriel de Oliveira Ramos

Learning to plan for long horizons is a central challenge in episodic reinforcement learning problems. A fundamental question is to understand how the difficulty of the problem scales as the horizon increases. Here the natural measure of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-10 Ruosong Wang , Simon S. Du , Lin F. Yang , Sham M. Kakade

Reinforcement learning (RL) in large or infinite state spaces is notoriously challenging, both theoretically (where worst-case sample and computational complexities must scale with state space cardinality) and experimentally (where function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Marcel Hussing , Michael Kearns , Aaron Roth , Sikata Bela Sengupta , Jessica Sorrell

Test-time compute scaling, the practice of spending extra computation during inference via repeated sampling, search, or extended reasoning, has become a powerful lever for improving large language model performance. Yet deploying these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Zhiyuan Zhai , Bingcong Li , Bingnan Xiao , Ming Li , Xin Wang

Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) is a structured approach for optimizing tasks with multiple objectives. However, it often relies on pre-defined reward functions, which can be hard to design for balancing conflicting goals and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Ni Mu , Yao Luan , Qing-Shan Jia

Imitation learning algorithms have been interpreted as variants of divergence minimization problems. The ability to compare occupancy measures between experts and learners is crucial in their effectiveness in learning from demonstrations.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Georgios Papagiannis , Yunpeng Li

Recent breakthroughs both in reinforcement learning and trajectory optimization have made significant advances towards real world robotic system deployment. Reinforcement learning (RL) can be applied to many problems without needing any…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Guillaume Bellegarda , Katie Byl

Designing robust reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the presence of imperfect reward signals remains a core challenge. In practice, agents are often trained with proxy rewards that only approximate the true objective, leaving them…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Zixuan Liu , Xiaolin Sun , Zizhan Zheng

Guided policy search algorithms can be used to optimize complex nonlinear policies, such as deep neural networks, without directly computing policy gradients in the high-dimensional parameter space. Instead, these methods use supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-18 William Montgomery , Sergey Levine

Despite its promise, reinforcement learning's real-world adoption has been hampered by the need for costly exploration to learn a good policy. Imitation learning (IL) mitigates this shortcoming by using an oracle policy during training as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-08 Ching-An Cheng , Andrey Kolobov , Alekh Agarwal

We introduce a constrained optimization method for policy gradient reinforcement learning, which uses a virtual trust region to regulate each policy update. In addition to using the proximity of one single old policy as the normal trust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Hung Le , Thommen Karimpanal George , Majid Abdolshah , Dung Nguyen , Kien Do , Sunil Gupta , Svetha Venkatesh

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is typically formulated as maximizing entropy subject to matching the distribution of expert trajectories. Classical (dual-ascent) IRL guarantees monotonic performance improvement but requires fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Anish Diwan , Davide Tateo , Christopher E. Mower , Haitham Bou-Ammar , Jan Peters , Oleg Arenz

Current reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can be brittle and difficult to use, especially when learning goal-reaching behaviors from sparse rewards. Although supervised imitation learning provides a simple and stable alternative, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Dibya Ghosh , Abhishek Gupta , Ashwin Reddy , Justin Fu , Coline Devin , Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine

We present Q-chunking, a simple yet effective recipe for improving reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for long-horizon, sparse-reward tasks. Our recipe is designed for the offline-to-online RL setting, where the goal is to leverage an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Qiyang Li , Zhiyuan Zhou , Sergey Levine

Imitation learning is an effective alternative approach to learn a policy when the reward function is sparse. In this paper, we consider a challenging setting where an agent and an expert use different actions from each other. We assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Konrad Zolna , Negar Rostamzadeh , Yoshua Bengio , Sungjin Ahn , Pedro O. Pinheiro

This article introduces an imitation learning method for learning maximum entropy policies that comply with constraints demonstrated by expert trajectories executing a task. The formulation of the method takes advantage of results…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 George Papadopoulos , George A. Vouros

The infinite horizon setting is widely adopted for problems of reinforcement learning (RL). These invariably result in stationary policies that are optimal. In many situations, finite horizon control problems are of interest and for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Soumyajit Guin , Shalabh Bhatnagar

In this paper, we present an online reinforcement learning algorithm, called Renewal Monte Carlo (RMC), for infinite horizon Markov decision processes with a designated start state. RMC is a Monte Carlo algorithm and retains the advantages…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-05 Jayakumar Subramanian , Aditya Mahajan