Related papers: Discounted Reinforcement Learning Is Not an Optimi…
Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…
Reinforcement learning is about learning agent models that make the best sequential decisions in unknown environments. In an unknown environment, the agent needs to explore the environment while exploiting the collected information, which…
This paper proposes a new reinforcement learning with hyperbolic discounting. Combining a new temporal difference error with the hyperbolic discounting in recursive manner and reward-punishment framework, a new scheme to learn the optimal…
Large reasoning models (LRMs) often consume excessive tokens, inflating computational cost and latency. More broadly, in goal reaching sequential decision problems we often want to reach the goal quickly, and LRM reasoning can be viewed…
Discount regularization, using a shorter planning horizon when calculating the optimal policy, is a popular choice to restrict planning to a less complex set of policies when estimating an MDP from sparse or noisy data (Jiang et al., 2015).…
Evolutionary strategies have recently been shown to achieve competing levels of performance for complex optimization problems in reinforcement learning. In such problems, one often needs to optimize an objective function subject to a set of…
In practical reinforcement learning (RL), the discount factor used for estimating value functions often differs from that used for defining the evaluation objective. In this work, we study the effect that this discrepancy of discount…
We study the safe reinforcement learning problem with nonlinear function approximation, where policy optimization is formulated as a constrained optimization problem with both the objective and the constraint being nonconvex functions. For…
In recent years, by leveraging more data, computation, and diverse tasks, learned optimizers have achieved remarkable success in supervised learning, outperforming classical hand-designed optimizers. Reinforcement learning (RL) is…
This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…
Reinforcement learning has traditionally been studied with exponential discounting or the average reward setup, mainly due to their mathematical tractability. However, such frameworks fall short of accurately capturing human behavior, which…
While reinforcement learning (RL) holds great potential for decision making in the real world, it suffers from a number of unique difficulties which often need specific consideration. In particular: it is highly non-stationary; suffers from…
In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…
In reinforcement learning, specifying reward functions that capture the intended task can be very challenging. Reward learning aims to address this issue by learning the reward function. However, a learned reward model may have a low error…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents have traditionally been tasked with maximizing the value function of a Markov decision process (MDP), either in continuous settings, with fixed discount factor $\gamma < 1$, or in episodic settings, with…
Inverse optimal control, also known as inverse reinforcement learning, is the problem of recovering an unknown reward function in a Markov decision process from expert demonstrations of the optimal policy. We introduce a probabilistic…
The most relevant problems in discounted reinforcement learning involve estimating the mean of a function under the stationary distribution of a Markov reward process, such as the expected return in policy evaluation, or the policy gradient…
Constrained reinforcement learning has achieved promising progress in safety-critical fields where both rewards and constraints are considered. However, constrained reinforcement learning methods face challenges in striking the right…
Despite the numerous advances, reinforcement learning remains away from widespread acceptance for autonomous controller design as compared to classical methods due to lack of ability to effectively tackle the reality gap. The reliance on…
Reinforcement learning (RL) combines a control problem with statistical estimation: The system dynamics are not known to the agent, but can be learned through experience. A recent line of research casts `RL as inference' and suggests a…