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Designing controllers that accomplish tasks while guaranteeing safety constraints remains a significant challenge. We often want an agent to perform well in a nominal task, such as environment exploration, while ensuring it can avoid unsafe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-04 Azra Begzadić , Nikhil Uday Shinde , Sander Tonkens , Dylan Hirsch , Kaleb Ugalde , Michael C. Yip , Jorge Cortés , Sylvia Herbert

We design a simple reinforcement learning (RL) agent that implements an optimistic version of $Q$-learning and establish through regret analysis that this agent can operate with some level of competence in any environment. While we leverage…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Shi Dong , Benjamin Van Roy , Zhengyuan Zhou

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

Model-based next state prediction and state value prediction are slow to converge. To address these challenges, we do the following: i) Instead of a neural network, we do model-based planning using a parallel memory retrieval system (which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-02 John Chong Min Tan , Mehul Motani

Autonomy is a key challenge for future space exploration endeavours. Deep Reinforcement Learning holds the promises for developing agents able to learn complex behaviours simply by interacting with their environment. This paper investigates…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-02 Matteo El Hariry , Andrea Cini , Giacomo Mellone , Alessandro Balossino

Reinforcement Learning (RL) in partially observable environments poses significant challenges due to the complexity of learning under uncertainty. While additional information, such as that available in simulations, can enhance training,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Yueheng Li , Guangming Xie , Zongqing Lu

We develop a continuous-time reinforcement learning framework for a class of singular stochastic control problems without entropy regularization. The optimal singular control is characterized as the optimal singular control law, which is a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-14 Zongxia Liang , Xiaodong Luo , Xiang Yu

The field of quickest change detection (QCD) focuses on the design and analysis of online algorithms that estimate the time at which a significant event occurs. In this paper, design and analysis are cast in a Bayesian framework, where QCD…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-30 Austin Cooper , Sean Meyn

In dynamic flow fields, various animals exhibit remarkable odor search capabilities despite relying on stochastic detections. Interestingly, there exists an optimal time window for integrating these detections that maximizes search…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Changxu Zhao , Dongxiao Zhao , Xin Bian , Gaojin Li

While reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to enable robots to autonomously acquire a wide range of skills, in practice, RL usually requires manual, per-task engineering of reward functions, especially in real world settings where…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-02-15 Tianhe Yu , Gleb Shevchuk , Dorsa Sadigh , Chelsea Finn

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have become indispensable tools in artificial intelligence, empowering agents to acquire optimal decision-making policies through interactions with their environment and feedback mechanisms. This study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-28 Ergon Cugler de Moraes Silva

This paper introduces Meta-Q-Learning (MQL), a new off-policy algorithm for meta-Reinforcement Learning (meta-RL). MQL builds upon three simple ideas. First, we show that Q-learning is competitive with state-of-the-art meta-RL algorithms if…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Rasool Fakoor , Pratik Chaudhari , Stefano Soatto , Alexander J. Smola

We study the problem of sample efficient reinforcement learning, where prior data such as demonstrations are provided for initialization in lieu of a dense reward signal. A natural approach is to incorporate an imitation learning objective,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Perry Dong , Alec M. Lessing , Annie S. Chen , Chelsea Finn

Pretraining reinforcement learning methods with demonstrations has been an important concept in the study of reinforcement learning since a large amount of computing power is spent on online simulations with existing reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-10 Xiaoqin Zhang , Yunfei Li , Huimin Ma , Xiong Luo

Behavior Trees (BTs) provide a structured and reactive framework for decision-making, commonly used to switch between sub-controllers based on environmental conditions. Reinforcement Learning (RL), on the other hand, can learn near-optimal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Finn Rietz , Mart Kartašev , Petter Ögren , Johannes A. Stork

We propose a policy improvement algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) which is called Rerouted Behavior Improvement (RBI). RBI is designed to take into account the evaluation errors of the Q-function. Such errors are common in RL when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-12 Elad Sarafian , Aviv Tamar , Sarit Kraus

In recent years there has been a collective research effort to find new formulations of reinforcement learning that are simultaneously more efficient and more amenable to analysis. This paper concerns one approach that builds on the linear…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-19 Fan Lu , Prashant Mehta , Sean Meyn , Gergely Neu

Reinforcement Learning algorithms have recently been proposed to learn time-sequential control policies in the field of autonomous driving. Direct applications of Reinforcement Learning algorithms with discrete action space will yield…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Pin Wang , Hanhan Li , Ching-Yao Chan

Model predictive control can optimally deal with nonlinear systems under consideration of constraints. The control performance depends on the model accuracy and the prediction horizon. Recent advances propose to use reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Dean Brandner , Sergio Lucia

Time-inconsistent preferences, where agents favor smaller-sooner over larger-later rewards, are a key feature of human and animal decision-making. Quasi-Hyperbolic (QH) discounting provides a simple yet powerful model for this behavior, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 S. R. Eshwar