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Connector insertion and many other tasks commonly found in modern manufacturing settings involve complex contact dynamics and friction. Since it is difficult to capture related physical effects with first-order modeling, traditional control…

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

Learning-based approaches for solving large sequential decision making problems have become popular in recent years. The resulting agents perform differently and their characteristics depend on those of the underlying learning approach.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Timo P. Gros , Daniel Höller , Jörg Hoffmann , Verena Wolf

Reinforcement learning (RL) has a rich history in neuroscience, from early work on dopamine as a reward prediction error signal (Schultz et al., 1997) to recent work proposing that the brain could implement a form of 'distributional…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2024-12-19 Kristopher T. Jensen

We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Nadav Merlis

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a branch of machine learning which is employed to solve various sequential decision making problems without proper supervision. Due to the recent advancement of deep learning, the newly proposed Deep-RL…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-04-17 Dhruv Ramani

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for autonomously acquiring complex behaviors from low level sensor observations. Although a large portion of deep RL research has focused on applications in video games…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Julian Ibarz , Jie Tan , Chelsea Finn , Mrinal Kalakrishnan , Peter Pastor , Sergey Levine

Embodied agents, such as robots and virtual characters, must continuously select actions to execute tasks effectively, solving complex sequential decision-making problems. Given the difficulty of designing such controllers manually,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Pedro Santana

The diversity of tasks and dynamic nature of reinforcement learning (RL) require RL agents to be able to learn sequentially and continuously, a learning paradigm known as continuous reinforcement learning. This survey reviews how continual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Amara Zuffer , Michael Burke , Mehrtash Harandi

The control of far-from-equilibrium physical systems, including active materials, has emerged as an important area for the application of reinforcement learning (RL) strategies to derive control policies for physical systems. In active…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-23 Dominik Schildknecht , Anastasia N. Popova , Jack Stellwagen , Matt Thomson

Reinforcement learning has been successful across several applications in which agents have to learn to act in environments with sparse feedback. However, despite this empirical success there is still a lack of theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-08 Blake Bordelon , Paul Masset , Henry Kuo , Cengiz Pehlevan

System identification, also known as learning forward models, transfer functions, system dynamics, etc., has a long tradition both in science and engineering in different fields. Particularly, it is a recurring theme in Reinforcement…

This paper bridges some of the gap between optimal planning and reinforcement learning (RL), both of which share roots in dynamic programming applied to sequential decision making or optimal control. Whereas planning typically favors…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Filip V. Georgiev , Kalle G. Timperi , Başak Sakçak , Steven M. LaValle

Training a deep neural network to maximize a target objective has become the standard recipe for successful machine learning over the last decade. These networks can be optimized with supervised learning, if the target objective is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Bernhard Jaeger , Andreas Geiger

Learned representations in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have to extract task-relevant information from complex observations, balancing between robustness to distraction and informativeness to the policy. Such stable and rich…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Mete Kemertas , Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong

Reinforcement Learning (RL) in various decision-making tasks of machine learning provides effective results with an agent learning from a stand-alone reward function. However, it presents unique challenges with large amounts of environment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-10 Neda Navidi

While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has fueled multiple high-profile successes in machine learning, it is held back from more widespread adoption by its often poor data efficiency and the limited generality of the policies it produces. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Jacob Beck , Risto Vuorio , Evan Zheran Liu , Zheng Xiong , Luisa Zintgraf , Chelsea Finn , Shimon Whiteson

Can humans get arbitrarily capable reinforcement learning (RL) agents to do their bidding? Or will sufficiently capable RL agents always find ways to bypass their intended objectives by shortcutting their reward signal? This question…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-03-29 Tom Everitt , Marcus Hutter , Ramana Kumar , Victoria Krakovna

The endeavor of artificial intelligence (AI) is to design autonomous agents capable of achieving complex tasks. Namely, reinforcement learning (RL) proposes a theoretical background to learn optimal behaviors. In practice, RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Firas Jarboui , Ahmed Akakzia

Training Transformers on algorithmic tasks frequently demonstrates an intriguing abrupt learning phenomenon: an extended performance plateau followed by a sudden, sharp improvement. This work investigates the underlying mechanisms for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Pulkit Gopalani , Wei Hu