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We introduce the framework of performative reinforcement learning where the policy chosen by the learner affects the underlying reward and transition dynamics of the environment. Following the recent literature on performative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-08 Debmalya Mandal , Stelios Triantafyllou , Goran Radanovic

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

Designing rewards for Reinforcement Learning (RL) is challenging because it needs to convey the desired task, be efficient to optimize, and be easy to compute. The latter is particularly problematic when applying RL to robotics, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-28 Yiming Ding , Carlos Florensa , Mariano Phielipp , Pieter Abbeel

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) looks at learning how to optimally solve tasks using a fixed dataset of interactions from the environment. Many off-policy algorithms developed for online learning struggle in the offline setting as they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Natinael Solomon Neggatu , Jeremie Houssineau , Giovanni Montana

Merely pursuing performance may adversely affect the safety, while a conservative policy for safe exploration will degrade the performance. How to balance the safety and performance in learning-based control problems is an interesting yet…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-28 Xinyang Wang , Hongwei Zhang , Shimin Wang , Wei Xiao , Martin Guay

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) policies often fail under dynamics that differ from training, a gap not fully addressed by domain randomization or existing adversarial RL methods. Distributionally robust RL provides a formal remedy but still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Mintae Kim , Koushil Sreenath

Modern meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) methods are mainly developed based on model-agnostic meta-learning, which performs policy gradient steps across tasks to maximize policy performance. However, the gradient conflict problem is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-22 Haozhi Wang , Qing Wang , Yunfeng Shao , Dong Li , Jianye Hao , Yinchuan Li

This paper develops the first policy gradient method with global optimality guarantee and complexity analysis for robust reinforcement learning under model mismatch. Robust reinforcement learning is to learn a policy robust to model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou

The performance of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters, with the learning rate being particularly influential. RL algorithms fail to reach convergence or demand an extensive number of samples…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Aida Afshar , Aldo Pacchiano

This paper investigates the impact of using gradient norm reward signals in the context of Automatic Curriculum Learning (ACL) for deep reinforcement learning (DRL). We introduce a framework where the teacher model, utilizing the gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Ryan Campbell , Junsang Yoon

Reinforcement learning (RL) and trajectory optimization (TO) present strong complementary advantages. On one hand, RL approaches are able to learn global control policies directly from data, but generally require large sample sizes to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Quentin Le Lidec , Wilson Jallet , Ivan Laptev , Cordelia Schmid , Justin Carpentier

We study the problem of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) with the added twist that the learner is assisted by a helpful teacher. More formally, we tackle the following algorithmic question: How could a teacher provide an informative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-07 Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Rati Devidze , Volkan Cevher , Adish Singla

In this paper, we study the problem of obtaining a control policy that can mimic and then outperform expert demonstrations in Markov decision processes where the reward function is unknown to the learning agent. One main relevant approach…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Feng Tao , Yongcan Cao

Most deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms distill experience into parametric behavior policies or value functions via gradient updates. While effective, this approach has several disadvantages: (1) it is computationally expensive,…

While reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved notable success in various domains, training effective policies for complex tasks remains challenging. Agents often converge to local optima and fail to maximize long-term rewards. Existing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Heng Tan , Hua Yan , Yu Yang

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques can benefit greatly from leveraging prior experience, which can be either self-generated or acquired from other entities. Action advising is a framework that provides a flexible way to transfer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Ercument Ilhan , Jeremy Gow , Diego Perez-Liebana

Large language models (LLMs) can transform education, but their optimization for direct question-answering often undermines effective pedagogy which requires strategically withholding answers. To mitigate this, we propose an online…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 David Dinucu-Jianu , Jakub Macina , Nico Daheim , Ido Hakimi , Iryna Gurevych , Mrinmaya Sachan

Learning near-optimal behaviour from an expert's demonstrations typically relies on the assumption that the learner knows the features that the true reward function depends on. In this paper, we study the problem of learning from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-28 Luis Haug , Sebastian Tschiatschek , Adish Singla

We study a Federated Reinforcement Learning (FedRL) problem with constraint heterogeneity. In our setting, we aim to solve a reinforcement learning problem with multiple constraints while $N$ training agents are located in $N$ different…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Hao Jin , Liangyu Zhang , Zhihua Zhang