English
Related papers

Related papers: Improving On-policy Learning with Statistical Rewa…

200 papers

While deep reinforcement learning has achieved tremendous successes in various applications, most existing works only focus on maximizing the expected value of total return and thus ignore its inherent stochasticity. Such stochasticity is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Han Zhong , Xun Deng , Ethan X. Fang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Runze Li

Rewards play a crucial role in reinforcement learning. To arrive at the desired policy, the design of a suitable reward function often requires significant domain expertise as well as trial-and-error. Here, we aim to minimize the effort…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-18 Zheng Wu , Wenzhao Lian , Vaibhav Unhelkar , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Stefan Schaal

This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-17 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Dale Schuurmans

Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning (RL) largely benefit from the inclusion of Deep Neural Networks, boosting the number of novel approaches proposed in the field of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). These techniques demonstrate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Giovanni Dispoto , Paolo Bonetti , Marcello Restelli

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to be often unsuccessful in environments with sparse extrinsic rewards. A possible countermeasure is to endow RL agents with an intrinsic reward function, or 'intrinsic motivation', which rewards the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Francesco Massari , Martin Biehl , Lisa Meeden , Ryota Kanai

With reinforcement learning, an agent could learn complex behaviors from high-level abstractions of the task. However, exploration and reward shaping remained challenging for existing methods, especially in scenarios where the extrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Jie Chen , Wenjun Xu

Reinforcement learning (RL) relies heavily on exploration to learn from its environment and maximize observed rewards. Therefore, it is essential to design a reward function that guarantees optimal learning from the received experience.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Ingy ElSayed-Aly , Lu Feng

Sparse reward problems are one of the biggest challenges in Reinforcement Learning. Goal-directed tasks are one such sparse reward problems where a reward signal is received only when the goal is reached. One promising way to train an agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Ameet Deshpande , Srikanth Sarma , Ashutosh Jha , Balaraman Ravindran

In a sequential decision-making problem, off-policy evaluation estimates the expected cumulative reward of a target policy using logged trajectory data generated from a different behavior policy, without execution of the target policy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Jie Wang , Rui Gao , Hongyuan Zha

In this paper, we study cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) where the joint reward exhibits submodularity, which is a natural property capturing diminishing marginal returns when adding agents to a team. Unlike standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Wenjing Chen , Chengyuan Qian , Shuo Xing , Yi Zhou , Victoria Crawford

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has made great achievements since proposed. Generally, DRL agents receive high-dimensional inputs at each step, and make actions according to deep-neural-network-based policies. This learning mechanism…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2019-12-30 Kun Shao , Zhentao Tang , Yuanheng Zhu , Nannan Li , Dongbin Zhao

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) enhances Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning but suffers from advantage collapse on ``hard samples'' where all rollouts fail. This lack of variance eliminates crucial learning signals.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Xinyu Lu , Kaiqi Zhang , Jinglin Yang , Boxi Cao , Yaojie Lu , Hongyu Lin , Min He , Xianpei Han , Le Sun

Dialog policies, which determine a system's action based on the current state at each dialog turn, are crucial to the success of the dialog. In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising option for dialog policy…

Reinforcement learning for embodied agents is a challenging problem. The accumulated reward to be optimized is often a very rugged function, and gradient methods are impaired by many local optimizers. We demonstrate, in an experimental…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-06-01 Guido Montufar , Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi , Nihat Ay

Probabilistic learning to rank (LTR) has been the dominating approach for optimizing the ranking metric, but cannot maximize long-term rewards. Reinforcement learning models have been proposed to maximize user long-term rewards by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Teng Xiao , Suhang Wang

We consider a problem of learning the reward and policy from expert examples under unknown dynamics. Our proposed method builds on the framework of generative adversarial networks and introduces the empowerment-regularized maximum-entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Ahmed H. Qureshi , Byron Boots , Michael C. Yip

Optimization of parameterized policies for reinforcement learning (RL) is an important and challenging problem in artificial intelligence. Among the most common approaches are algorithms based on gradient ascent of a score function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Sriram Srinivasan , Marc Lanctot , Vinicius Zambaldi , Julien Perolat , Karl Tuyls , Remi Munos , Michael Bowling

This paper extends off-policy reinforcement learning to the multi-agent case in which a set of networked agents communicating with their neighbors according to a time-varying graph collaboratively evaluates and improves a target policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-20 Wesley Suttle , Zhuoran Yang , Kaiqing Zhang , Zhaoran Wang , Tamer Basar , Ji Liu

Reinforcement learning is concerned with identifying reward-maximizing behaviour policies in environments that are initially unknown. State-of-the-art reinforcement learning approaches, such as deep Q-networks, are model-free and learn to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-08-18 Felix Leibfried , Nate Kushman , Katja Hofmann

Auction-based recommender systems are prevalent in online advertising platforms, but they are typically optimized to allocate recommendation slots based on immediate expected return metrics, neglecting the downstream effects of…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Ruiyang Xu , Jalaj Bhandari , Dmytro Korenkevych , Fan Liu , Yuchen He , Alex Nikulkov , Zheqing Zhu