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Reinforcement learning has demonstrated impressive performance in various challenging problems such as robotics, board games, and classical arcade games. However, its real-world applications can be hindered by the absence of robustness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Siemen Herremans , Ali Anwar , Siegfried Mercelis

Single-trajectory reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim to optimize policies from datasets consisting of (prompt, response, reward) triplets, where scalar rewards are directly available. This supervision format is highly practical, as it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Bilal Faye , Hanane Azzag , Mustapha Lebbah

Recent breakthroughs both in reinforcement learning and trajectory optimization have made significant advances towards real world robotic system deployment. Reinforcement learning (RL) can be applied to many problems without needing any…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Guillaume Bellegarda , Katie Byl

Reinforcement learning often requires extensive training data. Simulation-to-real transfer offers a promising approach to address this challenge in robotics. While differentiable simulators offer improved sample efficiency through exact…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Severin Bochem , Eduardo Gonzalez-Sanchez , Yves Bicker , Gabriele Fadini

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to solve the problem of finding obstacle-free paths for autonomous agents operating in stochastic and uncertain environments. However, when the underlying stochastic dynamics of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Sheryl Paul , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

Robust topology optimization (RTO), as a class of topology optimization problems, identifies a design with the best average performance while reducing the response sensitivity to input uncertainties, e.g. load uncertainty. Solving RTO is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Rini Jasmine Gladstone , Mohammad Amin Nabian , Vahid Keshavarzzadeh , Hadi Meidani

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is considered to be a promising approach to reduce the sample complexity that hinders model-free RL. However, the theoretical understanding of such methods has been rather limited. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yuping Luo , Huazhe Xu , Yuanzhi Li , Yuandong Tian , Trevor Darrell , Tengyu Ma

Zeroth-order (ZO, also known as derivative-free) methods, which estimate the gradient only by two function evaluations, have attracted much attention recently because of its broad applications in machine learning community. The two function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-12 Zhou Zhai , Bin Gu , Heng Huang

We propose a gradient-free deep reinforcement learning algorithm to solve high-dimensional, finite-horizon stochastic control problems. Although the recently developed deep reinforcement learning framework has achieved great success in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-03 Liyao Lyu , Jingrun Chen

Existing studies on constrained reinforcement learning (RL) may obtain a well-performing policy in the training environment. However, when deployed in a real environment, it may easily violate constraints that were originally satisfied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Zhongchang Sun , Sihong He , Fei Miao , Shaofeng Zou

A policy is said to be robust if it maximizes the reward while considering a bad, or even adversarial, model. In this work we formalize two new criteria of robustness to action uncertainty. Specifically, we consider two scenarios in which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-08 Chen Tessler , Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) can improve the robustness and fairness of learning methods. In this paper, we devise stochastic algorithms for a class of DRO problems including group DRO, subpopulation fairness, and empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Tasuku Soma , Khashayar Gatmiry , Sharut Gupta , Stefanie Jegelka

In neural combinatorial optimization (CO), reinforcement learning (RL) can turn a deep neural net into a fast, powerful heuristic solver of NP-hard problems. This approach has a great potential in practical applications because it allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-14 Yeong-Dae Kwon , Jinho Choo , Byoungjip Kim , Iljoo Yoon , Youngjune Gwon , Seungjai Min

State-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms mostly rely on being allowed to directly interact with their environment to collect millions of observations. This makes it hard to transfer their success to industrial control problems,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-23 Phillip Swazinna , Steffen Udluft , Thomas Runkler

Several fundamental problems in science and engineering consist of global optimization tasks involving unknown high-dimensional (black-box) functions that map a set of controllable variables to the outcomes of an expensive experiment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-15 Mohamed Aziz Bhouri , Michael Joly , Robert Yu , Soumalya Sarkar , Paris Perdikaris

While originally developed for continuous control problems, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has emerged as the work-horse of a variety of reinforcement learning (RL) applications, including the fine-tuning of generative models.…

Adversarial optimization algorithms that explicitly search for flaws in agents' policies have been successfully applied to finding robust and diverse policies in multi-agent settings. However, the success of adversarial optimization has…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Niklas Lauffer , Ameesh Shah , Micah Carroll , Sanjit A. Seshia , Stuart Russell , Michael Dennis

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) or verifiable rewards (RLVR), the standard paradigm for aligning LLMs or building recent SOTA reasoning models, is highly sensitive to noise from inconsistent or erroneous rewards. Yet, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Omar El Mansouri , Fathinah Asma Izzati , Mohamed El Amine Seddik , Salem Lahlou

The field of portfolio selection is an active research topic, which combines elements and methodologies from various fields, such as optimization, decision analysis, risk management, data science, forecasting, etc. The modeling and…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2020-10-28 A. Georgantas

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) uses model-free techniques to optimize task-specific control policies. Despite having emerged as a promising approach for complex problems, RL is still hard to use reliably for real-world applications. Apart…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Siddhant Gangapurwala , Alexander Mitchell , Ioannis Havoutis