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This research focuses on enhancing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms by integrating penalty functions to guide agents in avoiding unwanted actions while optimizing rewards. The goal is to improve the learning process by ensuring that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Sai Gana Sandeep Pula , Sathish A. P. Kumar , Sumit Jha , Arvind Ramanathan

A policy is said to be robust if it maximizes the reward while considering a bad, or even adversarial, model. In this work we formalize two new criteria of robustness to action uncertainty. Specifically, we consider two scenarios in which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-08 Chen Tessler , Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be effective in many scenarios. However, it typically requires the exploration of a sufficiently large number of state-action pairs, some of which may be unsafe. Consequently, its application to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-24 Yousef Emam , Gennaro Notomista , Paul Glotfelter , Zsolt Kira , Magnus Egerstedt

Zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a setting for developing general agents, capable of solving downstream tasks without additional training or planning at test-time. While conventional RL optimizes policies for fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Jacopo Di Ventura , Jan Felix Kleuker , Aske Plaat , Thomas Moerland

Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to enable autonomous acquisition of complex behaviors for diverse agents. However, the success of current reinforcement learning algorithms is predicated on an often under-emphasised requirement -- each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Archit Sharma , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine , Karol Hausman , Chelsea Finn

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a general framework concerned with an agent that seeks to maximize rewards in an environment. The learning typically happens through trial and error using explorative methods, such as epsilon-greedy. There are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Per-Arne Andersen , Morten Goodwin , Ole-Christoffer Granmo

An emerging field of sequential decision problems is safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the objective is to maximize the reward while obeying safety constraints. Being able to handle constraints is essential for deploying RL agents in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Nick Bührer , Zhejun Zhang , Alexander Liniger , Fisher Yu , Luc Van Gool

How can a reinforcement learning (RL) agent prepare to solve downstream tasks if those tasks are not known a priori? One approach is unsupervised skill discovery, a class of algorithms that learn a set of policies without access to a reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Benjamin Eysenbach , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Sergey Levine

Designing rewards for Reinforcement Learning (RL) is challenging because it needs to convey the desired task, be efficient to optimize, and be easy to compute. The latter is particularly problematic when applying RL to robotics, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-28 Yiming Ding , Carlos Florensa , Mariano Phielipp , Pieter Abbeel

Inferring reward functions from demonstrations and pairwise preferences are auspicious approaches for aligning Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents with human intentions. However, state-of-the art methods typically focus on learning a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Markus Peschl , Arkady Zgonnikov , Frans A. Oliehoek , Luciano C. Siebert

We propose a general formulation for addressing reinforcement learning (RL) problems in settings with observational data. That is, we consider the problem of learning good policies solely from historical data in which unobserved factors…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-31 Chaochao Lu , Bernhard Schölkopf , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato

We show that deep reinforcement learning algorithms can retain their ability to learn without resetting network parameters in settings where the number of gradient updates greatly exceeds the number of environment samples by combatting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Marcel Hussing , Claas Voelcker , Igor Gilitschenski , Amir-massoud Farahmand , Eric Eaton

Action-constrained reinforcement learning (RL) is a widely-used approach in various real-world applications, such as scheduling in networked systems with resource constraints and control of a robot with kinematic constraints. While the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Jyun-Li Lin , Wei Hung , Shang-Hsuan Yang , Ping-Chun Hsieh , Xi Liu

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

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

In this work, we address the problem of determining reliable policies in reinforcement learning (RL), with a focus on optimization under uncertainty and the need for performance guarantees. While classical RL algorithms aim at maximizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Nadir Farhi

How can we design good goals for arbitrarily intelligent agents? Reinforcement learning (RL) is a natural approach. Unfortunately, RL does not work well for generally intelligent agents, as RL agents are incentivised to shortcut the reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-05-11 Tom Everitt , Marcus Hutter

The problem of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in an unknown nonlinear dynamical system is equivalent to the search for an optimal feedback law utilizing the simulations/ rollouts of the dynamical system. Most RL techniques search over a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-25 Ran Wang , Karthikeya S. Parunandi , Aayushman Sharma , Raman Goyal , Suman Chakravorty

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for robotic path planning in uncertain environments. However, the control policies trained for an RL agent crucially depend on user-defined, state-based reward functions. Poorly designed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Anand Balakrishnan , Stefan Jakšić , Edgar A. Aguilar , Dejan Ničković , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

Though learning has become a core component of modern information processing, there is now ample evidence that it can lead to biased, unsafe, and prejudiced systems. The need to impose requirements on learning is therefore paramount,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Luiz F. O. Chamon , Santiago Paternain , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro