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Score-function based methods for policy learning, such as REINFORCE and PPO, have delivered strong results in game-playing and robotics, yet their high variance often undermines training stability. Using pathwise policy gradients, i.e.…

Reinforcement learning (RL) can refine Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies beyond behavior cloning, but real-world RL remains expensive due to extensive rollouts, resets, supervision, and safety risks. Action-conditioned video world…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Xiaokang Liu , Zechen Bai , Hai Ci , Kevin Yuchen Ma , Mike Zheng Shou

Learning from few demonstrations to develop policies robust to variations in robot initial positions and object poses is a problem of significant practical interest in robotics. Compared to imitation learning, which often struggles to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-30 Haowen Sun , Han Wang , Chengzhong Ma , Shaolong Zhang , Jiawei Ye , Xingyu Chen , Xuguang Lan

Recent advancements in legged robot locomotion have facilitated traversal over increasingly complex terrains. Despite this progress, many existing approaches rely on end-to-end deep reinforcement learning (DRL), which poses limitations in…

Reinforcement learning (RL) with continuous time and state/action spaces is often data-intensive and brittle under nuisance variability and shift, motivating methods that exploit value-preserving structures to stabilize and improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Zuyuan Zhang , Fei Xu Yu , Tian Lan

Diffusion models have emerged as powerful generative tools across various domains, yet tailoring pre-trained models to exhibit specific desirable properties remains challenging. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Fengyuan Dai , Zifeng Zhuang , Yufei Huang , Siteng Huang , Bangyan Liao , Donglin Wang , Fajie Yuan

Although well-established in general reinforcement learning (RL), value-based methods are rarely explored in constrained RL (CRL) for their incapability of finding policies that can randomize among multiple actions. To apply value-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Tianchi Cai , Wenpeng Zhang , Lihong Gu , Xiaodong Zeng , Jinjie Gu

Model-free or learning-based control, in particular, reinforcement learning (RL), is expected to be applied for complex robotic tasks. Traditional RL requires a policy to be optimized is state-dependent, that means, the policy is a kind of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-09 Taisuke Kobayashi , Kenta Yoshizawa

Keeping risk under control is often more crucial than maximizing expected rewards in real-world decision-making situations, such as finance, robotics, autonomous driving, etc. The most natural choice of risk measures is variance, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Xiaoteng Ma , Shuai Ma , Li Xia , Qianchuan Zhao

A key impediment to reinforcement learning (RL) in real applications with limited, batch data is defining a reward function that reflects what we implicitly know about reasonable behaviour for a task and allows for robust off-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Niranjani Prasad , Barbara E Engelhardt , Finale Doshi-Velez

The development of ethical AI systems is currently geared toward setting objective functions that align with human objectives. However, finding such functions remains a research challenge, while in RL, setting rewards by hand is a fairly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Marcin Korecki , Damian Dailisan , Cesare Carissimo

We study estimation and inference using data collected by reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. These algorithms adaptively experiment by interacting with individual units over multiple stages, updating their strategies based on past…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-06 Vasilis Syrgkanis , Ruohan Zhan

As autonomous robots move into complex, dynamic real-world environments, they must learn to navigate safely in real time, yet anticipating all possible behaviors is infeasible. We propose a composable, model-free reinforcement learning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Xinhuan Sang , Abdelrahman Abdelgawad , Roberto Tron

Online reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse rewards poses a challenge partly because of the lack of feedback on states leading to the goal. Furthermore, expert offline data with reward signal is rarely available to provide this feedback…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Nitish Dashora , Dibya Ghosh , Sergey Levine

Much of the recent success of deep reinforcement learning has been driven by regularized policy optimization (RPO) algorithms with strong performance across multiple domains. In this family of methods, agents are trained to maximize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-24 Ted Moskovitz , Michael Arbel , Jack Parker-Holder , Aldo Pacchiano

A key challenge in reward learning from human input is that desired agent behavior often changes based on context. For example, a robot must adapt to avoid a stove once it becomes hot. We observe that while high-level preferences (e.g.,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Alexandra Forsey-Smerek , Julie Shah , Andreea Bobu

Diffusion policies are becoming mainstream in robotic manipulation but suffer from hard negative class imbalance due to uniform sampling and lack of sample difficulty awareness, leading to slow training convergence and frequent inference…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Xinglei Yu , Zhenyang Liu , Shufeng Nan , Simo Wu , Yanwei Fu

Transfer reinforcement learning aims to improve the sample efficiency of solving unseen new tasks by leveraging experiences obtained from previous tasks. We consider the setting where all tasks (MDPs) share the same environment dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-08 Kaige Yang

Efficiently adapting to new environments and changes in dynamics is critical for agents to successfully operate in the real world. Reinforcement learning (RL) based approaches typically rely on external reward feedback for adaptation.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-05 Yuxiang Yang , Ken Caluwaerts , Atil Iscen , Jie Tan , Chelsea Finn

The high sample complexity of reinforcement learning challenges its use in practice. A promising approach is to quickly adapt pre-trained policies to new environments. Existing methods for this policy adaptation problem typically rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Yuda Song , Aditi Mavalankar , Wen Sun , Sicun Gao