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Accelerating learning processes for complex tasks by leveraging previously learned tasks has been one of the most challenging problems in reinforcement learning, especially when the similarity between source and target tasks is low. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-27 Yunzhe Tao , Sahika Genc , Jonathan Chung , Tao Sun , Sunil Mallya

Deep reinforcement learning can learn effective policies for a wide range of tasks, but is notoriously difficult to use due to instability and sensitivity to hyperparameters. The reasons for this remain unclear. When using standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-17 Aviral Kumar , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine

In this paper we design and evaluate a Deep-Reinforcement Learning agent that optimizes routing. Our agent adapts automatically to current traffic conditions and proposes tailored configurations that attempt to minimize the network delay.…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2017-09-22 Giorgio Stampa , Marta Arias , David Sanchez-Charles , Victor Muntes-Mulero , Albert Cabellos

Data selection is essential for any data-based optimization technique, such as Reinforcement Learning. State-of-the-art sampling strategies for the experience replay buffer improve the performance of the Reinforcement Learning agent.…

Reinforcement learning has the potential to automate the acquisition of behavior in complex settings, but in order for it to be successfully deployed, a number of practical challenges must be addressed. First, in real world settings, when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-11 Kelvin Xu , Siddharth Verma , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Exploration is a prerequisite for learning useful behaviors in sparse-reward, long-horizon tasks, particularly within 3D environments. Curiosity-driven reinforcement learning addresses this via intrinsic rewards derived from the mismatch…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Lily Goli , Justin Kerr , Daniele Reda , Alec Jacobson , Andrea Tagliasacchi , Angjoo Kanazawa

A major obstacle to developing artificial intelligence applications capable of true lifelong learning is that artificial neural networks quickly or catastrophically forget previously learned tasks when trained on a new one. Numerous methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-18 Gido M. van de Ven , Andreas S. Tolias

In the zero-shot policy transfer (ZSPT) setting for contextual Markov decision processes (MDP), agents train on a fixed set of contexts and must generalise to new ones. Recent work has argued and demonstrated that increased exploration can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Max Weltevrede , Caroline Horsch , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Wendelin Böhmer

Episodic memory is a psychology term which refers to the ability to recall specific events from the past. We suggest one advantage of this particular type of memory is the ability to easily assign credit to a specific state when remembered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-05 Kenny J. Young , Richard S. Sutton , Shuo Yang

Exploration is a crucial skill for in-context reinforcement learning in unknown environments. However, it remains unclear if large language models can effectively explore a partially hidden state space. This work isolates exploration as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Tim Grams , Patrick Betz , Sascha Marton , Stefan Lüdtke , Christian Bartelt

Reinforcement learning aims to learn optimal policies from interaction with environments whose dynamics are unknown. Many methods rely on the approximation of a value function to derive near-optimal policies. In partially observable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Gaspard Lambrechts , Adrien Bolland , Damien Ernst

A key challenge to deploying reinforcement learning in practice is avoiding excessive (harmful) exploration in individual episodes. We propose a natural constraint on exploration -- \textit{uniformly} outperforming a conservative policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Wanqiao Xu , Jason Yecheng Ma , Kan Xu , Hamsa Bastani , Osbert Bastani

Exploration in environments with sparse feedback remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning (RL). When the RL agent explores the environment randomly, it results in low exploration efficiency, especially in robotic…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Boyao Li , Tao Lu , Jiayi Li , Ning Lu , Yinghao Cai , Shuo Wang

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Viraj Mehta , Ian Char , Joseph Abbate , Rory Conlin , Mark D. Boyer , Stefano Ermon , Jeff Schneider , Willie Neiswanger

Stemming on the idea that a key objective in reinforcement learning is to invert a target distribution of effects, end-effect drives are proposed as an effective way to implement goal-directed motor learning, in the absence of an explicit…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Emmanuel Daucé

Effective reinforcement learning (RL) for complex stochastic systems requires leveraging historical data collected in previous iterations to accelerate policy optimization. Classical experience replay treats all past observations uniformly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-06 Hua Zheng , Wei Xie , M. Ben Feng , Keilung Choy

Reinforcement learning has shown great promise in robotics thanks to its ability to develop efficient robotic control procedures through self-training. In particular, reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to solving the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Pierre Aumjaud , David McAuliffe , Francisco Javier Rodríguez Lera , Philip Cardiff

Model free reinforcement learning suffers from the high sampling complexity inherent to robotic manipulation or locomotion tasks. Most successful approaches typically use random sampling strategies which leads to slow policy convergence. In…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-08-13 Miroslav Bogdanovic , Ludovic Righetti

Prioritized experience replay is a reinforcement learning technique whereby agents speed up learning by replaying useful past experiences. This usefulness is quantified as the expected gain from replaying the experience, a quantity often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Yizhi Yuan , Marcelo G Mattar

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser