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In a reinforcement learning (RL) setting, the agent's optimal strategy heavily depends on her risk preferences and the underlying model dynamics of the training environment. These two aspects influence the agent's ability to make…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Anthony Coache , Sebastian Jaimungal

Existing agents for solving tasks such as ML engineering rely on prompting powerful language models. As a result, these agents do not improve with more experience. In this paper, we show that agents backed by weaker models that improve via…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Sherry Yang , Joy He-Yueya , Percy Liang

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents often fail to generalize to unseen scenarios, even when they are trained on many instances of semantically similar environments. Data augmentation has recently been shown to improve the sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-23 Roberta Raileanu , Max Goldstein , Denis Yarats , Ilya Kostrikov , Rob Fergus

While deep reinforcement learning has achieved tremendous successes in various applications, most existing works only focus on maximizing the expected value of total return and thus ignore its inherent stochasticity. Such stochasticity is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Han Zhong , Xun Deng , Ethan X. Fang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Runze Li

Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has had incredible achievements on high dimensional problems, yet its learning process remains unstable even on the simplest tasks. Deep RL uses neural networks as function approximators. These neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Riccardo Della Vecchia , Alena Shilova , Philippe Preux , Riad Akrour

Many of the successes of machine learning are based on minimizing an averaged loss function. However, it is well-known that this paradigm suffers from robustness issues that hinder its applicability in safety-critical domains. These issues…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-09 Alexander Robey , Luiz F. O. Chamon , George J. Pappas , Hamed Hassani

We present a reinforcement learning (RL) approach for robust optimisation of risk-aware performance criteria. To allow agents to express a wide variety of risk-reward profiles, we assess the value of a policy using rank dependent expected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-16 Sebastian Jaimungal , Silvana Pesenti , Ye Sheng Wang , Hariom Tatsat

Although reinforcement learning (RL) can provide reliable solutions in many settings, practitioners are often wary of the discrepancies between the RL solution and their status quo procedures. Therefore, they may be reluctant to adapt to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Mohammadreza Nazari , Majid Jahani , Lawrence V. Snyder , Martin Takáč

One of the key challenges to deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) is to ensure safety at both training and testing phases. In this work, we propose a novel technique of unsupervised action planning to improve the safety of on-policy…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Hao-Lun Hsu , Qiuhua Huang , Sehoon Ha

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great success in solving many challenging tasks via use of deep neural networks. Although using deep learning for RL brings immense representational power, it also causes a well-known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-18 Sahir , Ercüment İlhan , Srijita Das , Matthew E. Taylor

The framework of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) provides a powerful and widely applicable mathematical formalization for sequential decision-making. This paper present a novel DRL framework, termed \emph{$f$-Divergence Reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-15 Chen Gong , Qiang He , Yunpeng Bai , Zhou Yang , Xiaoyu Chen , Xinwen Hou , Xianjie Zhang , Yu Liu , Guoliang Fan

We propose a novel approach to address one aspect of the non-stationarity problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL), where the other agents may alter their policies due to environment changes during execution. This violates the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Yixiang Wang , Feng Wu

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

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

The policy gradient method enjoys the simplicity of the objective where the agent optimizes the cumulative reward directly. Moreover, in the continuous action domain, parameterized distribution of action distribution allows easy control of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Md Masudur Rahman , Yexiang Xue

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are predominantly evaluated by comparing their relative performance on a large suite of tasks. Most published results on deep RL benchmarks compare point estimates of aggregate performance such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-06 Rishabh Agarwal , Max Schwarzer , Pablo Samuel Castro , Aaron Courville , Marc G. Bellemare

In an unfamiliar setting, a model-based reinforcement learning agent can be limited by the accuracy of its world model. In this work, we present a novel, training-free approach to improving the performance of such agents separately from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Martin Benfeghoul , Umais Zahid , Qinghai Guo , Zafeirios Fountas

Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a central optimisation framework in machine learning. Although RL agents can converge to optimal solutions, the definition of ``optimality'' depends on the environment's statistical properties. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Bert Verbruggen , Arne Vanhoyweghen , Vincent Ginis

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been widely used for a range of complex control tasks. However, slow convergence and sample inefficiency remain challenging problems in RL, especially when handling continuous and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Wenjie Shi , Shiji Song , Hui Wu , Ya-Chu Hsu , Cheng Wu , Gao Huang

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been around for decades and employed to solve various sequential decision-making problems. These algorithms however have faced great challenges when dealing with high-dimensional environments. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-01 Thanh Thi Nguyen , Ngoc Duy Nguyen , Saeid Nahavandi