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We study reinforcement learning from human feedback in general Markov decision processes, where agents learn from trajectory-level preference comparisons. A central challenge in this setting is to design algorithms that select informative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Reda Ouhamma , Maryam Kamgarpour

Reinforcement Learning (RL) and continuous nonlinear control have been successfully deployed in multiple domains of complicated sequential decision-making tasks. However, given the exploration nature of the learning process and the presence…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Wenhao Luo , Wen Sun , Ashish Kapoor

Efficient exploration is one of the key challenges for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Most traditional sample efficiency bounds require strategic exploration. Recently many deep RL algorithms with simple heuristic exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-19 Yao Liu , Emma Brunskill

Reinforcement learning (RL) so far has limited real-world applications. One key challenge is that typical RL algorithms heavily rely on a reset mechanism to sample proper initial states; these reset mechanisms, in practice, are expensive to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Hoai-An Nguyen , Ching-An Cheng

In this work, we evaluate the effectiveness of representation learning approaches for decision making in visually complex environments. Representation learning is essential for effective reinforcement learning (RL) from high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Jun Yamada , Karl Pertsch , Anisha Gunjal , Joseph J. Lim

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) considers the setting where the agent does not have access to a reward function during exploration, but must propose a near-optimal policy for an arbitrary reward function revealed only after…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Andrew Wagenmaker , Yifang Chen , Max Simchowitz , Simon S. Du , Kevin Jamieson

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

We present Revel, a partially neural reinforcement learning (RL) framework for provably safe exploration in continuous state and action spaces. A key challenge for provably safe deep RL is that repeatedly verifying neural networks within a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Greg Anderson , Abhinav Verma , Isil Dillig , Swarat Chaudhuri

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Viraj Mehta , Ian Char , Joseph Abbate , Rory Conlin , Mark D. Boyer , Stefano Ermon , Jeff Schneider , Willie Neiswanger

We give a novel formal theoretical framework for unsupervised learning with two distinctive characteristics. First, it does not assume any generative model and based on a worst-case performance metric. Second, it is comparative, namely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-12-28 Elad Hazan , Tengyu Ma

The exploration \& exploitation dilemma poses significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, curiosity-based exploration methods achieved great success in tackling hard-exploration problems. However, they necessitate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Yiran Wang , Chenshu Liu , Yunfan Li , Sanae Amani , Bolei Zhou , Lin F. Yang

While policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) achieves tremendous successes in practice, it is significantly less understood in theory, especially compared with value-based RL. In particular, it remains elusive how to design a provably…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Qi Cai , Zhuoran Yang , Chi Jin , Zhaoran Wang

In recent years deep neural networks have been successfully applied to the domains of reinforcement learning \cite{bengio2009learning,krizhevsky2012imagenet,hinton2006reducing}. Deep reinforcement learning \cite{mnih2015human} is reported…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Huihui Zhang , Wu Huang

We propose a framework for verifiable and compositional reinforcement learning (RL) in which a collection of RL subsystems, each of which learns to accomplish a separate subtask, are composed to achieve an overall task. The framework…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-13 Cyrus Neary , Aryaman Singh Samyal , Christos Verginis , Murat Cubuktepe , Ufuk Topcu

Optimizing objective functions subject to constraints is fundamental in many real-world applications. However, these constraints are often not readily defined and must be inferred from expert agent behaviors, a problem known as Inverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Bo Yue , Jian Li , Guiliang Liu

A precondition for the deployment of a Reinforcement Learning agent to a real-world system is to provide guarantees on the learning process. While a learning algorithm will eventually converge to a good policy, there are no guarantees on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-27 Paul Daoudi , Mathias Formoso , Othman Gaizi , Achraf Azize , Evrard Garcelon

Controlling artificial agents from visual sensory data is an arduous task. Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can succeed but require large amounts of interactions between the agent and the environment. To alleviate the issue,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Sai Rajeswar , Pietro Mazzaglia , Tim Verbelen , Alexandre Piché , Bart Dhoedt , Aaron Courville , Alexandre Lacoste

In reinforcement learning, we typically refer to unsupervised pre-training when we aim to pre-train a policy without a priori access to the task specification, i.e. rewards, to be later employed for efficient learning of downstream tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Riccardo Zamboni , Mirco Mutti , Marcello Restelli

Reinforcement learning provides a general framework for learning robotic skills while minimizing engineering effort. However, most reinforcement learning algorithms assume that a well-designed reward function is provided, and learn a single…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-04-28 Archit Sharma , Michael Ahn , Sergey Levine , Vikash Kumar , Karol Hausman , Shixiang Gu

This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi