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We introduce the cram method as a general statistical framework for evaluating the final learned policy from a multi-armed contextual bandit algorithm, using the dataset generated by the same bandit algorithm. The proposed on-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Zeyang Jia , Kosuke Imai , Michael Lingzhi Li

Imitation learning has enabled robots to perform complex, long-horizon tasks in challenging dexterous manipulation settings. As new methods are developed, they must be rigorously evaluated and compared against corresponding baselines…

Leveraging planning during learning and decision-making is central to the long-term development of intelligent agents. Recent works have successfully combined tree-based search methods and self-play learning mechanisms to this end. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Matthew V Macfarlane , Edan Toledo , Donal Byrne , Paul Duckworth , Alexandre Laterre

Despite success in many challenging problems, reinforcement learning (RL) is still confronted with sample inefficiency, which can be mitigated by introducing prior knowledge to agents. However, many transfer techniques in reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Matheus Centa , Philippe Preux

In recent years, there has been significant progress in applying deep reinforcement learning (RL) for solving challenging problems across a wide variety of domains. Nevertheless, convergence of various methods has been shown to suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-19 Pranav Khanna , Guy Tennenholtz , Nadav Merlis , Shie Mannor , Chen Tessler

Safe reinforcement learning (SafeRL) is a prominent paradigm for autonomous driving, where agents are required to optimize performance under strict safety requirements. This dual objective creates a fundamental tension, as overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Mahesh Keswani , Raunak Bhattacharyya

Estimating optimal dynamic policies from offline data is a fundamental problem in dynamic decision making. In the context of causal inference, the problem is known as estimating the optimal dynamic treatment regime. Even though there exists…

Econometrics · Economics 2023-12-15 Qizhao Chen , Morgane Austern , Vasilis Syrgkanis

When faced with a novel scenario, it can be hard to succeed on the first attempt. In these challenging situations, it is important to know how to retry quickly and meaningfully. Retrying behavior can emerge naturally in robots trained on…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Maximilian Du , Alexander Khazatsky , Tobias Gerstenberg , Chelsea Finn

Safety is a critical feature of controller design for physical systems. When designing control policies, several approaches to guarantee this aspect of autonomy have been proposed, such as robust controllers or control barrier functions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Luiz F. O. Chamon , Santiago Paternain

Safe exploration is a key to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in safety-critical systems. Existing safe exploration methods guaranteed safety under the assumption of regularity, and it has been difficult to apply them to large-scale…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Akifumi Wachi , Yunyue Wei , Yanan Sui

The famous Policy Iteration algorithm alternates between policy improvement and policy evaluation. Implementations of this algorithm with several variants of the latter evaluation stage, e.g, $n$-step and trace-based returns, have been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-08-01 Yonathan Efroni , Gal Dalal , Bruno Scherrer , Shie Mannor

Policy gradient methods are among the most effective methods for large-scale reinforcement learning, and their empirical success has prompted several works that develop the foundation of their global convergence theory. However, prior works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Junzi Zhang , Jongho Kim , Brendan O'Donoghue , Stephen Boyd

This paper proposes an off-policy risk-sensitive reinforcement learning based control framework for stabilization of a continuous-time nonlinear system that subjects to additive disturbances, input saturation, and state constraints. By…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-04-21 Cong Li , Qingchen Liu , Zhehua Zhou , Martin Buss , Fangzhou Liu

Linear dynamical systems that obey stochastic differential equations are canonical models. While optimal control of known systems has a rich literature, the problem is technically hard under model uncertainty and there are hardly any…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-09 Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh , Mohamad Sadegh Shirani Faradonbeh

Model-based reinforcement learning seeks to simultaneously learn the dynamics of an unknown stochastic environment and synthesise an optimal policy for acting in it. Ensuring the safety and robustness of sequential decisions made through a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Matthew Wicker , Luca Laurenti , Andrea Patane , Nicola Paoletti , Alessandro Abate , Marta Kwiatkowska

Residual Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular approach for adapting pretrained policies by learning a lightweight residual policy that provides corrective actions. While Residual RL is more sample-efficient than finetuning the entire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Lakshita Dodeja , Karl Schmeckpeper , Shivam Vats , Thomas Weng , Mingxi Jia , George Konidaris , Stefanie Tellex

Real-world control systems require policies that are not only high-performing but also interpretable and robust. A promising direction toward this goal is model-based control, which learns system dynamics and cost functions from historical…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-20 Yuexin Bian , Jie Feng , Yuanyuan Shi

Learning high-performance control policies that remain consistent with expert behavior is a fundamental challenge in robotics. Reinforcement learning can discover high-performing strategies but often departs from desirable human behavior,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Siwei Ju , Jan Tauberschmidt , Oleg Arenz , Peter van Vliet , Jan Peters

There exist a number of reinforcement learning algorithms which learnby climbing the gradient of expected reward. Their long-runconvergence has been proved, even in partially observableenvironments with non-deterministic actions, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-14 Lex Weaver , Nigel Tao

Robotic assembly presents a long-standing challenge due to its requirement for precise, contact-rich manipulation. While simulation-based learning has enabled the development of robust assembly policies, their performance often degrades…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Yijie Guo , Iretiayo Akinola , Lars Johannsmeier , Hugo Hadfield , Abhishek Gupta , Yashraj Narang