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While humans readily generalize abstract concepts to more complex or larger tasks, building Reinforcement Learning (RL) systems with this ability remains elusive. Here, we present the first theoretical model of how such Out-of-Distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Nasehatul Mustakim , Lucas Lehnert

Generalization in Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn an agent during training that generalizes to the target environment. This paper studies RL generalization from a theoretical aspect: how much can we expect pre-training over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-30 Haotian Ye , Xiaoyu Chen , Liwei Wang , Simon S. Du

Workforce optimization plays a crucial role in efficient organizational operations where decision-making may span several different administrative and time scales. For instance, dispatching personnel to immediate service requests while…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Kareem Eissa , Rayal Prasad , Sarith Mohan , Ankur Kapoor , Dorin Comaniciu , Vivek Singh

Generalization remains a challenging problem for deep reinforcement learning algorithms, which are often trained and tested on the same set of deterministic game environments. When test environments are unseen and perturbed but the nature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-06 Jerry Zikun Chen

The question of whether deep neural networks are good at generalising beyond their immediate training experience is of critical importance for learning-based approaches to AI. Here, we consider tests of out-of-sample generalisation that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-02-20 Felix Hill , Andrew Lampinen , Rosalia Schneider , Stephen Clark , Matthew Botvinick , James L. McClelland , Adam Santoro

The challenge of developing powerful and general Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents has received increasing attention in recent years. Much of this effort has focused on the single-agent setting, in which an agent maximizes a predefined…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-21 Jiachen Yang , Ang Li , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Peter Sunehag , Edward Hughes , Hongyuan Zha

In many reinforcement learning tasks, the goal is to learn a policy to manipulate an agent, whose design is fixed, to maximize some notion of cumulative reward. The design of the agent's physical structure is rarely optimized for the task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 David Ha

Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (RL) is widely believed to have the potential to improve sample efficiency by allowing an agent to synthesize large amounts of imagined experience. Experience Replay (ER) can be considered a simple kind of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Kenny Young , Aditya Ramesh , Louis Kirsch , Jürgen Schmidhuber

Generalizability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents (ability to perform on environments different from the ones they have been trained on) is a key problem as agents have the tendency to overfit to their training environments. In order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Olivier Moulin , Vincent Francois-lavet , Paul Elbers , Mark Hoogendoorn

Many real-world systems, such as transportation systems, ecological systems, and Internet systems, are complex systems. As an important tool for studying complex systems, computational experiments can map them into artificial society models…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Ming Zhang , Yiling Xuan , Qun Ma , Yuwei Guo

One of the remaining challenges in reinforcement learning is to develop agents that can generalise to novel scenarios they might encounter once deployed. This challenge is often framed in a multi-task setting where agents train on a fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Max Weltevrede , Felix Kaubek , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Wendelin Böhmer

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have emerged as a new paradigm that extends LLMs' capabilities beyond text generation to dynamic interaction with external environments. By integrating reasoning with perception, memory, and tool use,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Minxing Zhang , Yi Yang , Roy Xie , Bhuwan Dhingra , Shuyan Zhou , Jian Pei

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning in the real world involve interacting with other agents whose numbers vary over time. We propose new neural policy architectures for these multi-agent problems. In contrast to other…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Matthew A. Wright , Roberto Horowitz

Generalization is a major challenge for multi-agent reinforcement learning. How well does an agent perform when placed in novel environments and in interactions with new co-players? In this paper, we investigate and quantify the…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Kevin R. McKee , Joel Z. Leibo , Charlie Beattie , Richard Everett

Text-based games (TBG) have emerged as promising environments for driving research in grounded language understanding and studying problems like generalization and sample efficiency. Several deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Mattia Atzeni , Shehzaad Dhuliawala , Keerthiram Murugesan , Mrinmaya Sachan

Modern machine learning models are deployed in diverse, non-stationary environments where they must continually adapt to new tasks and evolving knowledge. Continual fine-tuning and in-context learning are costly and brittle, whereas neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Max S. Bennett , Thomas P. Zollo , Richard Zemel

Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique to train an agent to perform a task. However, an agent that is trained using reinforcement learning is only capable of achieving the single task that is specified via its reward function. Such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-24 Carlos Florensa , David Held , Xinyang Geng , Pieter Abbeel

To achieve general intelligence, agents must learn how to interact with others in a shared environment: this is the challenge of multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL). The simplest form is independent reinforcement learning (InRL), where…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Marc Lanctot , Vinicius Zambaldi , Audrunas Gruslys , Angeliki Lazaridou , Karl Tuyls , Julien Perolat , David Silver , Thore Graepel

A machine learning (ML) system must learn not only to match the output of a target function on a training set, but also to generalize to novel situations in order to yield accurate predictions at deployment. In most practical applications,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Clare Lyle

Complex, multi-task problems have proven to be difficult to solve efficiently in a sparse-reward reinforcement learning setting. In order to be sample efficient, multi-task learning requires reuse and sharing of low-level policies. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Valerie Chen , Abhinav Gupta , Kenneth Marino