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Model-free continuous control for robot navigation tasks using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) that relies on noisy policies for exploration is sensitive to the density of rewards. In practice, robots are usually deployed in cluttered…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-02-24 Mingyu Cai , Erfan Aasi , Calin Belta , Cristian-Ioan Vasile

The imbalance of exploration and exploitation has long been a significant challenge in reinforcement learning. In policy optimization, excessive reliance on exploration reduces learning efficiency, while over-dependence on exploitation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Renye Yan , Yaozhong Gan , You Wu , Ling Liang , Junliang Xing , Yimao Cai , Ru Huang

In real-world tasks, reinforcement learning (RL) agents frequently encounter situations that are not present during training time. To ensure reliable performance, the RL agents need to exhibit robustness against worst-case situations. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Sebastian Curi , Ilija Bogunovic , Andreas Krause

This paper presents a model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to synthesize a control policy that maximizes the satisfaction probability of linear temporal logic (LTL) specifications. Due to the consideration of environment and…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Mingyu Cai , Shaoping Xiao , Baoluo Li , Zhiliang Li , Zhen Kan

We investigate statistical uncertainty quantification for reinforcement learning (RL) and its implications in exploration policy. Despite ever-growing literature on RL applications, fundamental questions about inference and error…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 YI Zhu , Jing Dong , Henry Lam

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy learning from static data but often suffers from poor coverage of the state-action space and distributional shift problems. This problem can be addressed by allowing limited online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Soumyadeep Roy , Shashwat Kushwaha , Ambedkar Dukkipati

Online model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods with continuous actions are playing a prominent role when dealing with real-world applications such as Robotics. However, when confronted to non-stationary environments, these methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-07 Mehdi Khamassi , Costas Tzafestas

Meta-reinforcement learning requires utilizing prior task distribution information obtained during exploration to rapidly adapt to unknown tasks. The efficiency of an agent's exploration hinges on accurately identifying the current task.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Menglong Zhang , Fuyuan Qian

We study the problem of learning exploration-exploitation strategies that effectively adapt to dynamic environments, where the task may change over time. While RNN-based policies could in principle represent such strategies, in practice…

An emerging field of sequential decision problems is safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the objective is to maximize the reward while obeying safety constraints. Being able to handle constraints is essential for deploying RL agents in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Nick Bührer , Zhejun Zhang , Alexander Liniger , Fisher Yu , Luc Van Gool

Safety is critical to broadening the application of reinforcement learning (RL). Often, we train RL agents in a controlled environment, such as a laboratory, before deploying them in the real world. However, the real-world target task might…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-22 Qisong Yang , Thiago D. Simão , Nils Jansen , Simon H. Tindemans , Matthijs T. J. Spaan

Zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to learn a family of policies from a reward-free dataset, and recover optimal policies for any reward function directly at test time. Naturally, the quality of the pretraining dataset…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Jiajun Hu , Nuria Armengol Urpi , Jin Cheng , Stelian Coros

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-17 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Dale Schuurmans

The infamous exploration-exploitation dilemma is one of the oldest and most important problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Deliberate and effective exploration is necessary for RL agents to succeed in most environments. However, until…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-09 Suraj Narayanan Sasikumar

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based driver assistance systems seek to improve fuel consumption via continual improvement of powertrain control actions considering experiential data from the field. However, the need to explore diverse…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-01-04 Habtamu Hailemichael , Beshah Ayalew , Lindsey Kerbel , Andrej Ivanco , Keith Loiselle

A fundamental question in the theory of reinforcement learning is: suppose the optimal $Q$-function lies in the linear span of a given $d$ dimensional feature mapping, is sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) possible? The recent and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Yuanhao Wang , Ruosong Wang , Sham M. Kakade

Efficient exploration remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning, especially when an environment contains large state spaces, deceptive local optima, or sparse rewards. To tackle this problem, we present a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Zhang-Wei Hong , Tzu-Yun Shann , Shih-Yang Su , Yi-Hsiang Chang , Chun-Yi Lee

In inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), a learning agent infers a reward function encoding the underlying task using demonstrations from experts. However, many existing IRL techniques make the often unrealistic assumption that the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-04 Franck Djeumou , Christian Ellis , Murat Cubuktepe , Craig Lennon , Ufuk Topcu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful method for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Outcome-based RL, which rewards policies solely for the correctness of the final answer, yields substantial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Yuda Song , Julia Kempe , Remi Munos