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Policy robustness in Reinforcement Learning may not be desirable at any cost: the alterations caused by robustness requirements from otherwise optimal policies should be explainable, quantifiable and formally verifiable. In this work we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Daniel Jarne Ornia , Licio Romao , Lewis Hammond , Manuel Mazo , Alessandro Abate

Learning an optimal policy from a multi-modal reward function is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Hierarchical RL (HRL) tackles this problem by learning a hierarchical policy, where multiple option policies are in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-01 Takayuki Osa , Masashi Sugiyama

Rather than learning new control policies for each new task, it is possible, when tasks share some structure, to compose a "meta-policy" from previously learned policies. This paper reports results from experiments using Deep Reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-07 Richard Liaw , Sanjay Krishnan , Animesh Garg , Daniel Crankshaw , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Ken Goldberg

We study learning optimal policies from a logged dataset, i.e., offline RL, with function approximation. Despite the efforts devoted, existing algorithms with theoretic finite-sample guarantees typically assume exploratory data coverage or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Chenjie Mao

This paper presents a framework to tackle combinatorial optimization problems using neural networks and reinforcement learning. We focus on the traveling salesman problem (TSP) and train a recurrent network that, given a set of city…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-01-16 Irwan Bello , Hieu Pham , Quoc V. Le , Mohammad Norouzi , Samy Bengio

Maximum entropy reinforcement learning integrates exploration into policy learning by providing additional intrinsic rewards proportional to the entropy of some distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel approach in which the intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods in challenging reinforcement learning problems with large state and/or action spaces. However, little is known about even their most basic theoretical convergence properties,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Alekh Agarwal , Sham M. Kakade , Jason D. Lee , Gaurav Mahajan

The primary goal of reinforcement learning is to develop decision-making policies that prioritize optimal performance, frequently without considering safety. In contrast, safe reinforcement learning seeks to reduce or avoid unsafe behavior.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Zahra Shahrooei , Ali Baheri

Solving tasks with sparse rewards is a main challenge in reinforcement learning. While hierarchical controllers are an intuitive approach to this problem, current methods often require manual reward shaping, alternating training phases, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-04 Alexander Pashevich , Danijar Hafner , James Davidson , Rahul Sukthankar , Cordelia Schmid

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

We study the synthesis of a policy in a Markov decision process (MDP) following which an agent reaches a target state in the MDP while minimizing its total discounted cost. The problem combines a reachability criterion with a discounted…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-18 Yagiz Savas , Christos K. Verginis , Michael Hibbard , Ufuk Topcu

Designing optimal reward functions has been desired but extremely difficult in reinforcement learning (RL). When it comes to modern complex tasks, sophisticated reward functions are widely used to simplify policy learning yet even a tiny…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Ning Wei , Jiahua Liang , Di Xie , Shiliang Pu

In reinforcement learning, Return, which is the weighted accumulated future rewards, and Value, which is the expected return, serve as the objective that guides the learning of the policy. In classic RL, return is defined as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Yufei Wang , Qiwei Ye , Tie-Yan Liu

Achieving safe and coordinated behavior in dynamic, constraint-rich environments remains a major challenge for learning-based control. Pure end-to-end learning often suffers from poor sample efficiency and limited reliability, while…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-10 Max Studt , Georg Schildbach

Constrained reinforcement learning is to maximize the expected reward subject to constraints on utilities/costs. However, the training environment may not be the same as the test one, due to, e.g., modeling error, adversarial attack,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Yue Wang , Fei Miao , Shaofeng Zou

Hierarchies of temporally decoupled policies present a promising approach for enabling structured exploration in complex long-term planning problems. To fully achieve this approach an end-to-end training paradigm is needed. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Abdul Rahman Kreidieh , Glen Berseth , Brandon Trabucco , Samyak Parajuli , Sergey Levine , Alexandre M. Bayen

Many current behavior generation methods struggle to handle real-world traffic situations as they do not scale well with complexity. However, behaviors can be learned off-line using data-driven approaches. Especially, reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Patrick Hart , Leonard Rychly , Alois Knol

Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Santiago Paternain , Juan Andres Bazerque , Alejandro Ribeiro

Reinforcement learning is a framework for interactive decision-making with incentives sequentially revealed across time without a system dynamics model. Due to its scaling to continuous spaces, we focus on policy search where one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-04 Amrit Singh Bedi , Anjaly Parayil , Junyu Zhang , Mengdi Wang , Alec Koppel

Search-based methods for hard combinatorial optimization are often guided by heuristics. Tuning heuristics in various conditions and situations is often time-consuming. In this paper, we propose NeuRewriter that learns a policy to pick…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-31 Xinyun Chen , Yuandong Tian