Related papers: Is Long Horizon Reinforcement Learning More Diffic…
Episodic training, where an agent's environment is reset after every success or failure, is the de facto standard when training embodied reinforcement learning (RL) agents. The underlying assumption that the environment can be easily reset…
Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) is hypothesized to be able to leverage the inherent hierarchy in learning tasks where traditional reinforcement learning (RL) often fails. In this research, HRL is evaluated and contrasted with…
We address the problem of reward hacking, where maximising a proxy reward does not necessarily increase the true reward. This is a key concern for Large Language Models (LLMs), as they are often fine-tuned on human preferences that may not…
The test-time compute strategy, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), has significantly enhanced the ability of large language models to solve complex tasks like logical reasoning. However, empirical studies indicate that simply increasing the…
We consider reinforcement learning in an environment modeled by an episodic, finite, stage-dependent Markov decision process of horizon $H$ with $S$ states, and $A$ actions. The performance of an agent is measured by the regret after…
A self-learning optimal control algorithm for episodic fixed-horizon manufacturing processes with time-discrete control actions is proposed and evaluated on a simulated deep drawing process. The control model is built during consecutive…
Despite its potential to improve sample complexity versus model-free approaches, model-based reinforcement learning can fail catastrophically if the model is inaccurate. An algorithm should ideally be able to trust an imperfect model over a…
The problem of sample complexity of online reinforcement learning is often studied in the literature without taking into account any partial knowledge about the system dynamics that could potentially accelerate the learning process. In this…
Standard bandit algorithms that assume continual reallocation of measurement effort are challenging to implement due to delayed feedback and infrastructural/organizational difficulties. Motivated by practical instances involving a handful…
Hierarchical learning (HL) is key to solving complex sequential decision problems with long horizons and sparse rewards. It allows learning agents to break-up large problems into smaller, more manageable subtasks. A common approach to HL,…
The paradigm of decision-making has been revolutionised by reinforcement learning and deep learning. Although this has led to significant progress in domains such as robotics, healthcare, and finance, the use of RL in practice is…
Among various branches of offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods, goal-conditioned supervised learning (GCSL) has gained increasing popularity as it formulates the offline RL problem as a sequential modeling task, therefore bypassing…
Continual Learning (CL) considers the problem of training an agent sequentially on a set of tasks while seeking to retain performance on all previous tasks. A key challenge in CL is catastrophic forgetting, which arises when performance on…
The real world is unpredictable. Therefore, to solve long-horizon decision-making problems with autonomous robots, we must construct agents that are capable of adapting to changes in the environment during deployment. Model-based planning…
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…
Policies produced by deep reinforcement learning are typically characterised by their learning curves, but they remain poorly understood in many other respects. ReLU-based policies result in a partitioning of the input space into piecewise…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) learns effective policies from a static target dataset. The performance of state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms notwithstanding, it relies on the size of the target dataset, and it degrades if limited…
We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is typically formulated as maximizing entropy subject to matching the distribution of expert trajectories. Classical (dual-ascent) IRL guarantees monotonic performance improvement but requires fully…
We study the problem of programmatic reinforcement learning, in which policies are represented as short programs in a symbolic language. Programmatic policies can be more interpretable, generalizable, and amenable to formal verification…