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In this paper, we consider the important problem of safe exploration in reinforcement learning. While reinforcement learning is well-suited to domains with complex transition dynamics and high-dimensional state-action spaces, an additional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-05 Javier Garcia , Fernando Fernandez

Dealing with sparse rewards is a long-standing challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) addresses this problem by reusing failed trajectories for one goal as successful trajectories for another. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Liam Schramm , Yunfu Deng , Edgar Granados , Abdeslam Boularias

In many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL), performing actions requires consuming certain types of resources that are non-replenishable in each episode. Typical applications include robotic control with limited energy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Zhihai Wang , Taoxing Pan , Qi Zhou , Jie Wang

Reinforcement learning algorithms can acquire policies for complex tasks autonomously. However, the number of samples required to learn a diverse set of skills can be prohibitively large. While meta-reinforcement learning methods have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-17 Russell Mendonca , Xinyang Geng , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Although deep reinforcement learning has advanced significantly over the past several years, sample efficiency remains a major challenge. Careful choice of input representations can help improve efficiency depending on the structure present…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-08 John Mern , Dorsa Sadigh , Mykel Kochenderfer

We introduce Random Latent Exploration (RLE), a simple yet effective exploration strategy in reinforcement learning (RL). On average, RLE outperforms noise-based methods, which perturb the agent's actions, and bonus-based exploration, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Srinath Mahankali , Zhang-Wei Hong , Ayush Sekhari , Alexander Rakhlin , Pulkit Agrawal

To rapidly learn a new task, it is often essential for agents to explore efficiently -- especially when performance matters from the first timestep. One way to learn such behaviour is via meta-learning. Many existing methods however rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-11 Luisa Zintgraf , Leo Feng , Cong Lu , Maximilian Igl , Kristian Hartikainen , Katja Hofmann , Shimon Whiteson

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) offers a compelling approach to offline RL by enabling value learning on imagined on-policy trajectories. However, it often suffers from compounding errors due to repeated model inference on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Hojun Chung , Junseo Lee , Songhwai Oh

We study the problem of reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon discounted linear Markov decision processes (MDPs), and propose the first computationally efficient algorithm achieving rate-optimal regret guarantees in this setting. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Antoine Moulin , Gergely Neu , Luca Viano

Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) generally suffers from poor sample complexity, mostly due to the need to exhaustively explore the state-action space to find well-performing policies. On the other hand, we postulate that expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Loris Di Natale , Bratislav Svetozarevic , Philipp Heer , Colin N. Jones

Reinforcement learning studies how an agent should interact with an environment to maximize its cumulative reward. A standard way to study this question abstractly is to ask how many samples an agent needs from the environment to learn an…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-12-21 Daochen Wang , Aarthi Sundaram , Robin Kothari , Ashish Kapoor , Martin Roetteler

A key approach to state abstraction is approximating behavioral metrics (notably, bisimulation metrics) in the observation space and embedding these learned distances in the representation space. While promising for robustness to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Ziyan Luo , Tianwei Ni , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Doina Precup , Xujie Si

A key challenge in scaling up Reinforcement Learning is generalizing learned behaviour. Without the ability to carry forward acquired knowledge an agent is doomed to learn each task from scratch. In this paper we develop a new formalism for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Ruben Vereecken , Luke Dickens , Alessandra Russo

Reinforcement learning can train policies that effectively perform complex tasks. However for long-horizon tasks, the performance of these methods degrades with horizon, often necessitating reasoning over and chaining lower-level skills.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-31 Dhruv Shah , Peng Xu , Yao Lu , Ted Xiao , Alexander Toshev , Sergey Levine , Brian Ichter

This work pioneers regret analysis of risk-sensitive reinforcement learning in partially observable environments with hindsight observation, addressing a gap in theoretical exploration. We introduce a novel formulation that integrates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-29 Tonghe Zhang , Yu Chen , Longbo Huang

The ability to explore efficiently and effectively is a central challenge of reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider exploration through the lens of information theory. Specifically, we cast exploration as a problem of maximizing…

Combining model-based and model-free deep reinforcement learning has shown great promise for improving sample efficiency on complex control tasks while still retaining high performance. Incorporating imagination is a recent effort in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-11 Muhammad Burhan Hafez , Cornelius Weber , Matthias Kerzel , Stefan Wermter

Real-world sequential decision-making often involves parameterized action spaces that require both, decisions regarding discrete actions and decisions about continuous action parameters governing how an action is executed. Existing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Rashmeet Kaur Nayyar , Naman Shah , Siddharth Srivastava

We consider the general class of time-homogeneous stochastic dynamical systems, both discrete and continuous, and study the problem of learning a representation of the state that faithfully captures its dynamics. This is instrumental to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Vladimir R. Kostic , Pietro Novelli , Riccardo Grazzi , Karim Lounici , Massimiliano Pontil

Homing and navigation are fundamental behaviors in biological systems that enable agents to reliably reach a target under uncertainty. We present a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework to model adaptive homing in continuous two-dimensional…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-02-10 Riya Singh , Pratikshya Jena , Anish Kumar , Shradha Mishra