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The combination of exponentially large action spaces, stochastic dynamics, and long-horizon decision-making under limited resources makes Sequential Stochastic Combinatorial Optimization (SSCO) particularly challenging for reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Vivienne Huiling Wang , Tinghuai Wang , Joni Pajarinen

Policy gradient methods hold great potential for solving complex continuous control tasks. Still, their training efficiency can be improved by exploiting structure within the optimization problem. Recent work indicates that supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Jan Schneider , Pierre Schumacher , Simon Guist , Le Chen , Daniel Häufle , Bernhard Schölkopf , Dieter Büchler

We study a new two-time-scale stochastic gradient method for solving optimization problems, where the gradients are computed with the aid of an auxiliary variable under samples generated by time-varying MDPs controlled by the underlying…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-27 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

In reinforcement learning, agents often learn policies for specific tasks without the ability to generalize this knowledge to related tasks. This paper introduces an algorithm that attempts to address this limitation by decomposing neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Mahdi Alikhasi , Levi H. S. Lelis

Real-world tasks are often highly structured. Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) has attracted research interest as an approach for leveraging the hierarchical structure of a given task in reinforcement learning (RL). However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-08 Takayuki Osa , Voot Tangkaratt , Masashi Sugiyama

Though reinforcement learning has greatly benefited from the incorporation of neural networks, the inability to verify the correctness of such systems limits their use. Current work in explainable deep learning focuses on explaining only a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-30 Nicholay Topin , Manuela Veloso

The options framework in reinforcement learning models the notion of a skill or a temporally extended sequence of actions. The discovery of a reusable set of skills has typically entailed building options, that navigate to bottleneck…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Rahul Ramesh , Manan Tomar , Balaraman Ravindran

Hierarchical learning algorithms that gradually approximate a solution to a data-driven optimization problem are essential to decision-making systems, especially under limitations on time and computational resources. In this study, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-22 Christos Mavridis , John Baras

Offline Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown potent in many safe-critical tasks in robotics where exploration is risky and expensive. However, it still struggles to acquire skills in temporally extended tasks. In this paper, we study the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Jinning Li , Chen Tang , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Wei Zhan

Multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) is commonly considered to suffer from non-stationary environments and exponentially increasing policy space. It would be even more challenging when rewards are sparse and delayed over long…

Solving complex problems using reinforcement learning necessitates breaking down the problem into manageable tasks and learning policies to solve these tasks. These policies, in turn, have to be controlled by a master policy that takes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-09 Ambedkar Dukkipati , Rajarshi Banerjee , Ranga Shaarad Ayyagari , Dhaval Parmar Udaybhai

Solving complex, temporally-extended tasks is a long-standing problem in reinforcement learning (RL). We hypothesize that one critical element of solving such problems is the notion of compositionality. With the ability to learn concepts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Yiding Jiang , Shixiang Gu , Kevin Murphy , Chelsea Finn

Reinforcement learning has shown promise in learning policies that can solve complex problems. However, manually specifying a good reward function can be difficult, especially for intricate tasks. Inverse reinforcement learning offers a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-28 Peter Henderson , Wei-Di Chang , Pierre-Luc Bacon , David Meger , Joelle Pineau , Doina Precup

Bilevel learning refers to machine learning problems that can be formulated as bilevel optimization models, where decisions are organized in a hierarchical structure. This paradigm has recently gained considerable attention in machine…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-05 Riccardo Grazzi , Massimiliano Pontil , Saverio Salzo , Alain Zemkoho

This paper introduces an automated skill acquisition framework in reinforcement learning which involves identifying a hierarchical description of the given task in terms of abstract states and extended actions between abstract states.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Aravind Srinivas , Ramnandan Krishnamurthy , Peeyush Kumar , Balaraman Ravindran

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning algorithms have successfully been applied to temporal credit assignment problems with sparse reward signals. However, state-of-the-art algorithms require manual specification of sub-task structures, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-24 Robert Tjarko Lange , Aldo Faisal

While the difficulty of reinforcement learning problems is typically related to the complexity of their state spaces, Abstraction proposes that solutions often lie in simpler underlying latent spaces. Prior works have focused on learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Amnon Attali , Pedro Cisneros-Velarde , Marco Morales , Nancy M. Amato

The main focus of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is studying how large Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) can be more efficiently solved when addressed in a modular way, by combining partial solutions computed for smaller subtasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Roberto Cipollone , Luca Iocchi , Matteo Leonetti

Deep reinforcement learning agents are often misaligned, as they over-exploit early reward signals. Recently, several symbolic approaches have addressed these challenges by encoding sparse objectives along with aligned plans. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Zihan Ye , Phil Chau , Raban Emunds , Jannis Blüml , Cedric Derstroff , Quentin Delfosse , Oleg Arenz , Kristian Kersting

The option-critic architecture (Bacon, Harb, and Precup 2017) and several variants have successfully demonstrated the use of the options framework proposed by Sutton et al (Sutton, Precup, and Singh1999) to scale learning and planning in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-06-13 Elita Lobo , Scott Jordan