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Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Andreas Doerr , Michael Volpp , Marc Toussaint , Sebastian Trimpe , Christian Daniel

Reinforcement learning (RL), a common tool in decision making, learns control policies from various experiences based on the associated cumulative return/rewards without treating them differently. Humans, on the contrary, often learn to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

Reinforcement Learning (RL) in environments with complex, history-dependent reward structures poses significant challenges for traditional methods. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that leverages automaton-based feedback to guide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Mahyar Alinejad , Alvaro Velasquez , Yue Wang , George Atia

In sparse reward scenarios of reinforcement learning (RL), the memory mechanism provides promising shortcuts to policy optimization by reflecting on past experiences like humans. However, current memory-based RL methods simply store and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Renye Yan , Yaozhong Gan , You Wu , Junliang Xing , Ling Liangn , Yeshang Zhu , Yimao Cai

The sequential nature of decision-making in financial asset trading aligns naturally with the reinforcement learning (RL) framework, making RL a common approach in this domain. However, the low signal-to-noise ratio in financial markets…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Sven Goluža , Tomislav Kovačević , Stjepan Begušić , Zvonko Kostanjčar

Learning continuous control in high-dimensional sparse reward settings, such as robotic manipulation, is a challenging problem due to the number of samples often required to obtain accurate optimal value and policy estimates. While many…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-29 Sreehari Rammohan , Shangqun Yu , Bowen He , Eric Hsiung , Eric Rosen , Stefanie Tellex , George Konidaris

While recent progress in deep reinforcement learning has enabled robots to learn complex behaviors, tasks with long horizons and sparse rewards remain an ongoing challenge. In this work, we propose an effective reward shaping method through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Xingyu Lu , Stas Tiomkin , Pieter Abbeel

Making sophisticated, robust, and safe sequential decisions is at the heart of intelligent systems. This is especially critical for planning in complex multi-agent environments, where agents need to anticipate other agents' intentions and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-01-29 Yichuan Charlie Tang

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

Deep reinforcement learning has proven remarkably useful in training agents from unstructured data. However, the opacity of the produced agents makes it difficult to ensure that they adhere to various requirements posed by human engineers.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Raz Yerushalmi , Guy Amir , Achiya Elyasaf , David Harel , Guy Katz , Assaf Marron

Developing agents that can perform challenging complex tasks is the goal of reinforcement learning. The model-free reinforcement learning has been considered as a feasible solution. However, the state of the art research has been to develop…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-24 MyungJae Shin , Joongheon Kim

We investigate the combination of actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms with uniform large-scale experience replay and propose solutions for two challenges: (a) efficient actor-critic learning with experience replay (b) stability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Simon Schmitt , Matteo Hessel , Karen Simonyan

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods usually treat reward functions as black boxes. As such, these methods must extensively interact with the environment in order to discover rewards and optimal policies. In most RL applications, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Toryn Q. Klassen , Richard Valenzano , Sheila A. McIlraith

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in fields like robotics and autonomous driving, but adversarial attacks designed to mislead RL systems remain challenging. Existing approaches often rely on modifying the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Junyong Jiang , Buwei Tian , Chenxing Xu , Songze Li , Lu Dong

As machine learning models become more capable, they have exhibited increased potential in solving complex tasks. One of the most promising directions uses deep reinforcement learning to train autonomous agents in computer network defense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Elizabeth Bates , Vasilios Mavroudis , Chris Hicks

Dealing with environments with sparse rewards has always been crucial for systems developed to operate in autonomous open-ended learning settings. Intrinsic Motivations could be an effective way to help Deep Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Gianluca Maselli , Vieri Giuliano Santucci

Medical treatments often involve a sequence of decisions, each informed by previous outcomes. This process closely aligns with reinforcement learning (RL), a framework for optimizing sequential decisions to maximize cumulative rewards under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Ali Shirali , Alexander Schubert , Ahmed Alaa

Current model-based reinforcement learning approaches use the model simply as a learned black-box simulator to augment the data for policy optimization or value function learning. In this paper, we show how to make more effective use of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Ignasi Clavera , Violet Fu , Pieter Abbeel

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a promising approach for teaching robots new behaviour. However, one of its main limitations is the need for carefully hand-coded reward signals by an expert. We argue that it is crucial to automate the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-08-09 Abdalkarim Mohtasib , Gerhard Neumann , Heriberto Cuayahuitl

Traditional multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms, such as independent Q-learning, struggle when presented with partially observable scenarios, and where agents are required to develop delicate action sequences. This is often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-21 F. Bredell , H. A. Engelbrecht , J. C. Schoeman