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Previous work in hierarchical reinforcement learning has faced a dilemma: either ignore the values of different possible exit states from a subroutine, thereby risking suboptimal behavior, or represent those values explicitly thereby…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-07-02 Bhaskara Marthi , Stuart Russell , David Andre

One of the fundamental challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) is the one of data efficiency: modern algorithms require a very large number of training samples, especially compared to humans, for solving environments with high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-10 Hlynur Davíð Hlynsson , Laurenz Wiskott

Quantifying the value of data is a fundamental problem in machine learning. Data valuation has multiple important use cases: (1) building insights about the learning task, (2) domain adaptation, (3) corrupted sample discovery, and (4)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-27 Jinsung Yoon , Sercan O. Arik , Tomas Pfister

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

Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based control system has received considerable attention in recent decades. However, in many real-world problems, such as Batch Process Control, the environment is uncertain, which requires expensive interaction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-03 Peng Zhang , Yawen Huang , Bingzhang Hu , Shizheng Wang , Haoran Duan , Noura Al Moubayed , Yefeng Zheng , Yang Long

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been recognized as a powerful tool for robot control tasks. RL typically employs reward functions to define task objectives and guide agent learning. However, since the reward function serves the dual purpose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Zhao Yu , Xiuping Wu , Liangjun Ke

In recommender systems, reinforcement learning solutions have shown promising results in optimizing the interaction sequence between users and the system over the long-term performance. For practical reasons, the policy's actions are…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Xiaobei Wang , Shuchang Liu , Xueliang Wang , Qingpeng Cai , Lantao Hu , Han Li , Peng Jiang , Kun Gai , Guangming Xie

We propose a distributional framework for offline Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) that jointly models uncertainty over reward functions and full distributions of returns. Unlike conventional IRL approaches that recover a deterministic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Feiyang Wu , Ye Zhao , Anqi Wu

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that users specify tasks by manually writing down a reward function. However, this process can be laborious and demands considerable technical expertise. Can we devise RL algorithms that instead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Representation learning and exploration are among the key challenges for any deep reinforcement learning agent. In this work, we provide a singular value decomposition based method that can be used to obtain representations that preserve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-03 Yash Chandak , Shantanu Thakoor , Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Yunhao Tang , Remi Munos , Will Dabney , Diana L Borsa

Despite the increasing popularity of policy gradient methods, they are yet to be widely utilized in sample-scarce applications, such as robotics. The sample efficiency could be improved by making best usage of available information. As a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Qingfeng Lan , Samuele Tosatto , Homayoon Farrahi , A. Rupam Mahmood

Multi-task representation learning (MTRL) is an approach that learns shared latent representations across related tasks, facilitating collaborative learning that improves the overall learning efficiency. This paper studies MTRL for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yaoze Guo , Shana Moothedath

Current end-to-end deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches require jointly learning perception, decision-making and low-level control from very sparse reward signals and high-dimensional inputs, with little capability of incorporating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-10 Vibhavari Dasagi , Robert Lee , Serena Mou , Jake Bruce , Niko Sünderhauf , Jürgen Leitner

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a promising approach for teaching robots new behaviour. However, one of its main limitations is the need for carefully hand-coded reward signals by an expert. We argue that it is crucial to automate the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-08-09 Abdalkarim Mohtasib , Gerhard Neumann , Heriberto Cuayahuitl

We consider the differentiation of the value function for parametric optimization problems. Such problems are ubiquitous in Machine Learning applications such as structured support vector machines, matrix factorization and min-min or…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-12-29 Sheheryar Mehmood , Peter Ochs

Online reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse rewards poses a challenge partly because of the lack of feedback on states leading to the goal. Furthermore, expert offline data with reward signal is rarely available to provide this feedback…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Nitish Dashora , Dibya Ghosh , Sergey Levine

In reinforcement learning, the value function is typically trained to solve the Bellman equation, which connects the current value to future values. This temporal dependency hints that the value function may contain implicit information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Jacob Adamczyk

In recent years, there are great interests as well as challenges in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to recommendation systems (RS). In this paper, we summarize three key practical challenges of large-scale RL-based recommender systems:…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Kai Wang , Zhene Zou , Qilin Deng , Runze Wu , Jianrong Tao , Changjie Fan , Liang Chen , Peng Cui

We focus on reinforcement learning (RL) in relational problems that are naturally defined in terms of objects, their relations, and object-centric actions. These problems are characterized by variable state and action spaces, and finding a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Jaromír Janisch , Tomáš Pevný , Viliam Lisý

We propose RUDDER, a novel reinforcement learning approach for delayed rewards in finite Markov decision processes (MDPs). In MDPs the Q-values are equal to the expected immediate reward plus the expected future rewards. The latter are…