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Prior work on safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) has studied risk-aversion to randomness in dynamics (aleatory) and to model uncertainty (epistemic) in isolation. We propose and analyze a new framework to jointly model the risk associated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Jia Lin Hau , Marek Petrik , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Reazul Russel

Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs) intend to ensure robustness with respect to changing or adversarial system behavior. In this framework, transitions are modeled as arbitrary elements of a known and properly structured uncertainty…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-25 Esther Derman , Daniel Mankowitz , Timothy Mann , Shie Mannor

Model-based reinforcement learning promises strong sample efficiency but often underperforms in practice due to compounding model error, unimodal world models that average over multi-modal dynamics, and overconfident predictions that bias…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Mehran Aghabozorgi , Alireza Moazeni , Yanshu Zhang , Ke Li

This paper presents a model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to solve the risk-averse optimal control (RAOC) problem for discrete-time nonlinear systems. While successful RL algorithms have been presented to learn optimal control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-03-29 Yuzhen Han , Majid Mazouchi , Subramanya Nageshrao , Hamidreza Modares

Robust reinforcement learning (RRL) aims at seeking a robust policy to optimize the worst case performance over an uncertainty set of Markov decision processes (MDPs). This set contains some perturbed MDPs from a nominal MDP (N-MDP) that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Ukjo Hwang , Songnam Hong

Mutual information-based reinforcement learning (RL) has been proposed as a promising framework for retrieving complex skills autonomously without a task-oriented reward function through mutual information (MI) maximization or variational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Seongun Kim , Kyowoon Lee , Jaesik Choi

Deep reinforcement learning has over the past few years shown great potential in learning near-optimal control in complex simulated environments with little visible information. Rainbow (Q-Learning) and PPO (Policy Optimisation) have shown…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-07-30 Per-Arne Andersen , Morten Goodwin , Ole-Christoffer Granmo

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) has garnered significant attention in recent years due to the growing interest in deploying RL agents in real-world scenarios. A critical aspect of risk awareness involves modeling highly rare risk…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Karthik Somayaji NS , Yu Wang , Malachi Schram , Jan Drgona , Mahantesh Halappanavar , Frank Liu , Peng Li

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

Residual Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular approach for adapting pretrained policies by learning a lightweight residual policy that provides corrective actions. While Residual RL is more sample-efficient than finetuning the entire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Lakshita Dodeja , Karl Schmeckpeper , Shivam Vats , Thomas Weng , Mingxi Jia , George Konidaris , Stefanie Tellex

Learning-based techniques have become popular in both model predictive control (MPC) and reinforcement learning (RL). Probabilistic ensemble (PE) models offer a promising approach for modelling system dynamics, showcasing the ability to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Yuan Zhang , Jasper Hoffmann , Joschka Boedecker

Model-free reinforcement learning based methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization, or Q-learning typically require thousands of interactions with the environment to approximate the optimum controller which may not always be feasible in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-16 Narendra Patwardhan , Zequn Wang

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has improved the reasoning ability of large language models, yet training remains costly because many rollouts contribute little to optimization, considering the amount of computation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Yan Sun , Jia Guo , Stanley Kok , Zihao Wang , Zujie Wen , Zhiqiang Zhang

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can attain excellent sample efficiency, but often lag behind the best model-free algorithms in terms of asymptotic performance. This is especially true with high-capacity parametric…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-05 Kurtland Chua , Roberto Calandra , Rowan McAllister , Sergey Levine

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) circumvents the need for reward engineering by harnessing human preferences as the reward signal. However, current PbRL methods excessively depend on high-quality feedback from domain experts,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Jie Cheng , Gang Xiong , Xingyuan Dai , Qinghai Miao , Yisheng Lv , Fei-Yue Wang

Planning through crowded environments under uncertain obstacle motions remains difficult, as stochastic interactions often induce overly conservative behavior or reduced efficiency. To address this challenge, we propose an end-to-end risk…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Xinyi Wang , Taekyung Kim , Bardh Hoxha , Georgios Fainekos , Dimitra Panagou

Offline reinforcement learning restricts the learning process to rely only on logged-data without access to an environment. While this enables real-world applications, it also poses unique challenges. One important challenge is dealing with…

We develop an approach for solving time-consistent risk-sensitive stochastic optimization problems using model-free reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, we assume agents assess the risk of a sequence of random variables using dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Anthony Coache , Sebastian Jaimungal

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) is to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. In this paper, we focus on model-free robust RL, where the uncertainty set is defined to be centering at a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Yue Wang , Shaofeng Zou

Exploration in environments with continuous control and sparse rewards remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, surprise has been used as an intrinsic reward that encourages systematic and efficient exploration. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-01 Haitao Xu , Brendan McCane , Lech Szymanski