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Related papers: Connecting the Dots Between MLE and RL for Sequenc…

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Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been used to learn effective heuristics for solving complex combinatorial optimisation problem via policy networks and have demonstrated promising performance. Existing works have focused on solving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Nasrin Sultana , Jeffrey Chan , A. K. Qin , Tabinda Sarwar

Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Cevahir Koprulu , Ufuk Topcu

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

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

The objective comparison of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms is notoriously complex as outcomes and benchmarking of performances of different RL approaches are critically sensitive to environmental design, reward structures, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Sinan Ibrahim , Grégoire Ouerdane , Hadi Salloum , Henni Ouerdane , Stefan Streif , Pavel Osinenko

This paper introduces a simple efficient learning algorithms for general sequential decision making. The algorithm combines Optimism for exploration with Maximum Likelihood Estimation for model estimation, which is thus named OMLE. We prove…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-24 Qinghua Liu , Praneeth Netrapalli , Csaba Szepesvári , Chi Jin

There has been significant progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) in recent years. Nevertheless, finding suitable hyperparameter configurations and reward functions remains challenging even for experts, and performance heavily relies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Julian Dierkes , Emma Cramer , Holger H. Hoos , Sebastian Trimpe

Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is the predominant algorithm for training text generation models. This paradigm relies on direct supervision examples, which is not applicable to many emerging applications, such as generating adversarial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Han Guo , Bowen Tan , Zhengzhong Liu , Eric P. Xing , Zhiting Hu

We propose and study a general framework for regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected discounted total reward plus a policy regularization term. The extant…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-22 Xiang Li , Wenhao Yang , Zhihua Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been shown to be capable of learning intelligent behavior in rich domains. However, this has largely been done in simulated domains without adequate focus on the process of building the simulator. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-24 Aditya Modi , Nan Jiang , Ambuj Tewari , Satinder Singh

In this effort, we consider the impact of regularization on the diversity of actions taken by policies generated from reinforcement learning agents trained using a policy gradient. Policy gradient agents are prone to entropy collapse, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Andrew Starnes , Anton Dereventsov , Clayton Webster

We provide a statistical analysis of regularization-based continual learning on a sequence of linear regression tasks, with emphasis on how different regularization terms affect the model performance. We first derive the convergence rate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Xuyang Zhao , Huiyuan Wang , Weiran Huang , Wei Lin

In this paper, a new population-guided parallel learning scheme is proposed to enhance the performance of off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). In the proposed scheme, multiple identical learners with their own value-functions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Whiyoung Jung , Giseung Park , Youngchul Sung

Maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE) is widely used in sequence to sequence tasks for model training. It uniformly treats the generation/prediction of each target token as multi-class classification, and yields non-smooth prediction…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-12-13 Chengyue Gong , Xu Tan , Di He , Tao Qin

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in performing complex multi-step reasoning, yet they continue to struggle with mathematical reasoning, often making systematic errors. A promising solution is reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Hanning Zhang , Pengcheng Wang , Shizhe Diao , Yong Lin , Rui Pan , Hanze Dong , Dylan Zhang , Pavlo Molchanov , Tong Zhang

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover the reward function and the associated optimal policy that best fits observed sequences of states and actions implemented by an expert. Many algorithms for IRL have an inherently nested…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-02 Siliang Zeng , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

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

Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) works well when experience can be collected cheaply and model-based RL is effective when system dynamics can be modeled accurately. However, both assumptions can be violated in real world problems such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-07 Mohak Bhardwaj , Ankur Handa , Dieter Fox , Byron Boots

Many real world tasks exhibit rich structure that is repeated across different parts of the state space or in time. In this work we study the possibility of leveraging such repeated structure to speed up and regularize learning. We start…