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Despite recent advances in improving the sample-efficiency of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, designing an RL algorithm that can be practically deployed in real-world environments remains a challenge. In this paper, we present…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Younggyo Seo , Jafar Uruç , Stephen James

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has gained widespread adoption in recent years but faces significant challenges, particularly in unknown and complex environments. Among these, high-dimensional action selection stands out as a critical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-08 Wenbo Zhang , Hengrui Cai

In model-based reinforcement learning (RL), an agent can leverage a learned model to improve its way of behaving in different ways. Two of the prevalent ways to do this are through decision-time and background planning methods. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Safa Alver , Doina Precup

This paper addresses the challenge of navigation in large, visually complex environments with sparse rewards. We propose a method that uses object-oriented macro actions grounded in a topological map, allowing a simple Deep Q-Network (DQN)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Simon Hakenes , Tobias Glasmachers

When using reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms it is common, given a large state space, to introduce some form of approximation architecture for the value function (VF). The exact form of this architecture can have a significant effect…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Edward Barker , Charl Ras

We present a general convergent class of reinforcement learning algorithms that is founded on two distinct principles: (1) mapping value estimates to a different space using arbitrary functions from a broad class, and (2) linearly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-18 Mehdi Fatemi , Arash Tavakoli

While the recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have achieved impressive results in learning motor skills, many of the trained policies are only capable within a limited set of initial states. We propose a technique to break down a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-11-19 Visak C. V. Kumar , Sehoon Ha , C. Karen Liu

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is a sample efficient technique to obtain control policies, yet unavoidable modeling errors often lead performance deterioration. The model in MBRL is often solely fitted to reconstruct dynamics,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Claas Voelcker , Victor Liao , Animesh Garg , Amir-massoud Farahmand

Policy evaluation or value function or Q-function approximation is a key procedure in reinforcement learning (RL). It is a necessary component of policy iteration and can be used for variance reduction in policy gradient methods. Therefore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-10-17 Xinyan Yan , Krzysztof Choromanski , Byron Boots , Vikas Sindhwani

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) promises the ability to learn effective policies solely using existing, static datasets, without any costly online interaction. To do so, offline RL methods must handle distributional shift between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Joey Hong , Aviral Kumar , Sergey Levine

In this work, we study value function approximation in reinforcement learning (RL) problems with high dimensional state or action spaces via a generalized version of representation policy iteration (RPI). We consider the limitations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-18 Sephora Madjiheurem , Laura Toni

Q-Learning is a fundamental off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that has the objective of approximating action-value functions in order to learn optimal policies. Nonetheless, it has difficulties in reconciling bias with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-22 Mahammad Humayoo

In many practical uses of reinforcement learning (RL) the set of actions available at a given state is a random variable, with realizations governed by an exogenous stochastic process. Somewhat surprisingly, the foundations for such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Craig Boutilier , Alon Cohen , Amit Daniely , Avinatan Hassidim , Yishay Mansour , Ofer Meshi , Martin Mladenov , Dale Schuurmans

Deep reinforcement learning techniques have demonstrated superior performance in a wide variety of environments. As improvements in training algorithms continue at a brisk pace, theoretical or empirical studies on understanding what these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-16 Raghuram Mandyam Annasamy , Katia Sycara

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated success in solving complex sequential decision-making problems by integrating neural networks with the RL framework. However, training deep RL models poses several challenges, such as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Sooraj Sathish , Keshav Goyal , Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi

Despite the recent advancements in offline RL, no unified algorithm could achieve superior performance across a broad range of tasks. Offline \textit{value function learning}, in particular, struggles with sparse-reward, long-horizon tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Chang Chen , Junyeob Baek , Fei Deng , Kenji Kawaguchi , Caglar Gulcehre , Sungjin Ahn

Achieving safe and coordinated behavior in dynamic, constraint-rich environments remains a major challenge for learning-based control. Pure end-to-end learning often suffers from poor sample efficiency and limited reliability, while…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-10 Max Studt , Georg Schildbach

Reward machines (RMs) are a recent formalism for representing the reward function of a reinforcement learning task through a finite-state machine whose edges encode subgoals of the task using high-level events. The structure of RMs enables…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Daniel Furelos-Blanco , Mark Law , Anders Jonsson , Krysia Broda , Alessandra Russo

Real-world tasks are often highly structured. Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) has attracted research interest as an approach for leveraging the hierarchical structure of a given task in reinforcement learning (RL). However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-08 Takayuki Osa , Voot Tangkaratt , Masashi Sugiyama

Explaining the behaviour of intelligent agents learned by reinforcement learning (RL) to humans is challenging yet crucial due to their incomprehensible proprioceptive states, variational intermediate goals, and resultant unpredictability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Wenhao Lu , Xufeng Zhao , Sven Magg , Martin Gromniak , Mengdi Li , Stefan Wermter