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Despite impressive results using reinforcement learning to solve complex problems from scratch, in robotics this has still been largely limited to model-based learning with very informative reward functions. One of the major challenges is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-19 Steve Heim , Alexander Spröwitz

Robots must know how to be gentle when they need to interact with fragile objects, or when the robot itself is prone to wear and tear. We propose an approach that enables deep reinforcement learning to train policies that are gentle, both…

Rewards and punishments in different forms are pervasive and present in a wide variety of decision-making scenarios. By observing the outcome of a sufficient number of repeated trials, one would gradually learn the value and usefulness of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Nikki Lijing Kuang , Clement H. C. Leung

Intelligent decision-making within large and redundant action spaces remains challenging in deep reinforcement learning. Considering similar but ineffective actions at each step can lead to repetitive and unproductive trials. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Wenzhang Liu , Lianjun Jin , Lu Ren , Chaoxu Mu , Changyin Sun

Safe reinforcement learning is a promising path toward applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems, where suboptimal behaviors may lead to actual negative consequences. In this work, we focus on the setting where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-17 Garrett Thomas , Yuping Luo , Tengyu Ma

There exist a number of reinforcement learning algorithms which learnby climbing the gradient of expected reward. Their long-runconvergence has been proved, even in partially observableenvironments with non-deterministic actions, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-14 Lex Weaver , Nigel Tao

A shortcoming of existing reachability approaches for nonlinear systems is the poor scalability with the number of continuous state variables. To mitigate this problem we present a simulation-based approach where we first sample a number of…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-09-21 Murat Arcak , John Maidens

Large reasoning models improve with more test-time computation, but often overthink, producing unnecessarily long chains-of-thought that raise cost without improving accuracy. Prior reinforcement learning approaches typically rely on a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Xintong Li , Sha Li , Rongmei Lin , Hongye Jin , Linwei Li , Hejie Cui , Sarah Zhang , Chia-Yuan Chang , Kewei Cheng , Besnik Fetahu , Priyanka Nigam , Jingbo Shang , Bing Yin

Ensuring safety is important for the practical deployment of reinforcement learning (RL). Various challenges must be addressed, such as handling stochasticity in the environments, providing rigorous guarantees of persistent state-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Milan Ganai , Zheng Gong , Chenning Yu , Sylvia Herbert , Sicun Gao

In reinforcement learning, it is common to let an agent interact for a fixed amount of time with its environment before resetting it and repeating the process in a series of episodes. The task that the agent has to learn can either be to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-28 Fabio Pardo , Arash Tavakoli , Vitaly Levdik , Petar Kormushev

We propose a simple, practical, and intuitive approach for domain adaptation in reinforcement learning. Our approach stems from the idea that the agent's experience in the source domain should look similar to its experience in the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-16 Benjamin Eysenbach , Swapnil Asawa , Shreyas Chaudhari , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

State of the art reinforcement learning methods sometimes encounter unsafe situations. Identifying when these situations occur is of interest both for post-hoc analysis and during deployment, where it might be advantageous to call out to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Alexander Grushin , Walt Woods , Alvaro Velasquez , Simon Khan

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) can elicit strong multi-step reasoning, yet it often encourages overly verbose traces. Moreover, naive length penalties in group-relative optimization can severely hurt accuracy. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Keqin Peng , Yuanxin Ouyang , Xuebo Liu , Zhiliang Tian , Ruijian Han , Yancheng Yuan , Liang Ding

Reinforcement learning usually uses the feedback rewards of environmental to train agents. But the rewards in the actual environment are sparse, and even some environments will not rewards. Most of the current methods are difficult to get…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-13 Kai Jiang , XiaoLong Qin

Safety is one of the main challenges in applying reinforcement learning to realistic environmental tasks. To ensure safety during and after training process, existing methods tend to adopt overly conservative policy to avoid unsafe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Xiao Zhang , Hai Zhang , Hongtu Zhou , Chang Huang , Di Zhang , Chen Ye , Junqiao Zhao

We show that when a third party, the adversary, steps into the two-party setting (agent and operator) of safely interruptible reinforcement learning, a trade-off has to be made between the probability of following the optimal policy in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-30 Henrik Aslund , El Mahdi El Mhamdi , Rachid Guerraoui , Alexandre Maurer

Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task. This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Dhawal Gupta , Yash Chandak , Scott M. Jordan , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems typically optimize scalar reward functions that assume precise and reliable evaluation of outcomes. However, real-world objectives--especially those derived from human preferences--are often uncertain,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Disha Singha

In dynamic settings each economic agent's choices can be revealing of her private information. This elicitation via the rationalization of observable behavior depends each agent's perception of which payoff-relevant contingencies other…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-05-17 Evan Piermont , Peio Zuazo-Garin

In reward-poisoning attacks against reinforcement learning (RL), an attacker can perturb the environment reward $r_t$ into $r_t+\delta_t$ at each step, with the goal of forcing the RL agent to learn a nefarious policy. We categorize such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Xuezhou Zhang , Yuzhe Ma , Adish Singla , Xiaojin Zhu