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Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) methods can successfully solve a wide range of sequential decision problems. However, learning policies that can generalize predictably across multiple tasks in a setting with non-Markovian reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Guillermo Infante , David Kuric , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez , Herke van Hoof

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can learn complex policies to optimize agent operation over time. RL algorithms have shown promising results in solving complicated problems in recent years. However, their application on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-29 Hamed Khorasgani , Haiyan Wang , Chetan Gupta , Susumu Serita

We initiate the study of fairness in reinforcement learning, where the actions of a learning algorithm may affect its environment and future rewards. Our fairness constraint requires that an algorithm never prefers one action over another…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-08 Shahin Jabbari , Matthew Joseph , Michael Kearns , Jamie Morgenstern , Aaron Roth

In reinforcement learning, two objective functions have been developed extensively in the literature: discounted and averaged rewards. The generalization to an entropy-regularized setting has led to improved robustness and exploration for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-20 Jacob Adamczyk , Volodymyr Makarenko , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

Deep reinforcement learning enables algorithms to learn complex behavior, deal with continuous action spaces and find good strategies in environments with high dimensional state spaces. With deep reinforcement learning being an active area…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-17 Winfried Lötzsch

We consider the problem of imitation learning from a finite set of expert trajectories, without access to reinforcement signals. The classical approach of extracting the expert's reward function via inverse reinforcement learning, followed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Ruohan Wang , Carlo Ciliberto , Pierluigi Amadori , Yiannis Demiris

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central problem in artificial intelligence. This problem consists of defining artificial agents that can learn optimal behaviour by interacting with an environment -- where the optimal behaviour is defined…

We study the problem of representation learning in goal-conditioned hierarchical reinforcement learning. In such hierarchical structures, a higher-level controller solves tasks by iteratively communicating goals which a lower-level policy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-01-10 Ofir Nachum , Shixiang Gu , Honglak Lee , Sergey Levine

Supervised approaches for text summarisation suffer from the problem of mismatch between the target labels/scores of individual sentences and the evaluation score of the final summary. Reinforcement learning can solve this problem by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-11-15 Diego Molla

Recent multi-task learning research argues against unitary scalarization, where training simply minimizes the sum of the task losses. Several ad-hoc multi-task optimization algorithms have instead been proposed, inspired by various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-10 Vitaly Kurin , Alessandro De Palma , Ilya Kostrikov , Shimon Whiteson , M. Pawan Kumar

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning under safety requirements, in which an agent is trained to complete a given task, typically formalized as the maximization of a reward signal over time, while concurrently avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Tu-Hoa Pham , Giovanni De Magistris , Don Joven Agravante , Subhajit Chaudhury , Asim Munawar , Ryuki Tachibana

In reinforcement learning (RL), it is often advantageous to consider additional constraints on the action space to ensure safety or action relevance. Existing work on such action-constrained RL faces challenges regarding effective policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Roland Stolz , Michael Eichelbeck , Matthias Althoff

In this work, we provide theoretical guarantees for reward decomposition in deterministic MDPs. Reward decomposition is a special case of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, that allows one to learn many policies in parallel and combine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-14 Tom Zahavy , Avinatan Hasidim , Haim Kaplan , Yishay Mansour

In this paper the connection between stochastic optimal control and reinforcement learning is investigated. Our main motivation is to apply importance sampling to sampling rare events which can be reformulated as an optimal control problem.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-16 Jannes Quer , Enric Ribera Borrell

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to discover better actions through exploration. However, typical exploration techniques aim to maximize rewards, often incurring high costs in both exploration and learning processes. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Akane Tsuboya , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi

In an effort to better understand the different ways in which the discount factor affects the optimization process in reinforcement learning, we designed a set of experiments to study each effect in isolation. Our analysis reveals that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-24 Harm van Seijen , Mehdi Fatemi , Arash Tavakoli

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems are fundamental in online decision-making and have been instrumental in finding an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs). Function approximations are usually deployed to handle large or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jiashuo Jiang , Yiming Zong , Yinyu Ye

After four decades of research there still exists a Classification accuracy gap of about 20% between our best Unsupervisedly Learned Representations methods and the accuracy rates achieved by intelligent animals. It thus may well be that we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Daniel N. Nissani

A key problem in reinforcement learning for control with general function approximators (such as deep neural networks and other nonlinear functions) is that, for many algorithms employed in practice, updates to the policy or $Q$-function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-01 Joshua Achiam

Finding optimal policies which maximize long term rewards of Markov Decision Processes requires the use of dynamic programming and backward induction to solve the Bellman optimality equation. However, many real-world problems require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal