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Humans are known to have an internal "world model" that enables us to carry out action planning based on world states. AI agents need to have such a world model for action planning as well. It is not clear how current AI models, especially…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Delong Chen , Willy Chung , Yejin Bang , Ziwei Ji , Pascale Fung

The problem of mixed static and dynamic obstacle avoidance is essential for path planning in highly dynamic environment. However, the paths formed by grid edges can be longer than the true shortest paths in the terrain since their headings…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Junxiao Xue , Xiangyan Kong , Bowei Dong , Mingliang Xu

The goal of policy gradient approaches is to find a policy in a given class of policies which maximizes the expected return. Given a differentiable model of the policy, we want to apply a gradient-ascent technique to reach a local optimum.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-13 Mattis Manfred Kämmerer

Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) is a generalization of traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) that aims to optimize multiple, often conflicting objectives simultaneously rather than focusing on a single reward. This approach…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Davide Guidobene , Lorenzo Benedetti , Diego Arapovic

Planning is a powerful approach to reinforcement learning with several desirable properties. However, it requires a model of the world, which is not readily available in many real-life problems. In this paper, we propose to learn a world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Thor V. A. N. Olesen , Dennis T. T. Nguyen , Rasmus Berg Palm , Sebastian Risi

Transformers have increasingly outperformed gated RNNs in obtaining new state-of-the-art results on supervised tasks involving text sequences. Inspired by this trend, we study the question of how Transformer-based models can improve the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-19 Ricky Loynd , Roland Fernandez , Asli Celikyilmaz , Adith Swaminathan , Matthew Hausknecht

Reinforcement learning algorithms such as the deep deterministic policy gradient algorithm (DDPG) has been widely used in continuous control tasks. However, the model-free DDPG algorithm suffers from high sample complexity. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-14 Qingpeng Cai , Ling Pan , Pingzhong Tang

In long-horizon tasks, recent agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) face a significant challenge that sparse, outcome-based rewards make it difficult to assign credit to intermediate steps. Previous methods mainly focus on creating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Jiawei Wang , Jiacai Liu , Yuqian Fu , Yingru Li , Xintao Wang , Yuan Lin , Yu Yue , Lin Zhang , Yang Wang , Ke Wang

We study policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning in non-Markovian decision processes (NMDPs), where observations and rewards depend on the entire interaction history. To handle this dependence, the agent maintains an internal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Avik Kar , Siddharth Chandak , Rahul Singh , Soumitra Sinhahajari , Eric Moulines , Shalabh Bhatnagar , Nicholas Bambos

Policy gradient methods are a widely used class of model-free reinforcement learning algorithms where a state-dependent baseline is used to reduce gradient estimator variance. Several recent papers extend the baseline to depend on both the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 George Tucker , Surya Bhupatiraju , Shixiang Gu , Richard E. Turner , Zoubin Ghahramani , Sergey Levine

In this work we are the first to present an offline policy gradient method for learning imitative policies for complex urban driving from a large corpus of real-world demonstrations. This is achieved by building a differentiable data-driven…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-29 Oliver Scheel , Luca Bergamini , Maciej Wołczyk , Błażej Osiński , Peter Ondruska

Model Predictive Control (MPC) is among the most widely adopted and reliable methods for robot control, relying critically on an accurate dynamics model. However, existing dynamics models used in the gradient-based MPC are limited by…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Jan Węgrzynowski , Piotr Kicki , Grzegorz Czechmanowski , Maciej Krupka , Krzysztof Walas

To interact effectively with humans in the real world, it is important for agents to understand language that describes the dynamics of the environment--that is, how the environment behaves--rather than just task instructions specifying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Anh Nguyen , Stefan Lee

Generalist robot policies can now perform a wide range of manipulation skills, but evaluating and improving their ability with unfamiliar objects and instructions remains a significant challenge. Rigorous evaluation requires a large number…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yanjiang Guo , Lucy Xiaoyang Shi , Jianyu Chen , Chelsea Finn

Reinforcement learning suffers from limitations in real practices primarily due to the number of required interactions with virtual environments. It results in a challenging problem because we are implausible to obtain a local optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Qizhen Wu , Kexin Liu , Lei Chen

Model-free and model-based reinforcement learning are two ends of a spectrum. Learning a good policy without a dynamic model can be prohibitively expensive. Learning the dynamic model of a system can reduce the cost of learning the policy,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Arash Mehrjou , Ashkan Soleymani , Stefan Bauer , Bernhard Schölkopf

Policy gradient (PG) methods have played an essential role in the empirical successes of reinforcement learning. In order to handle large state-action spaces, PG methods are typically used with function approximation. In this setting, the…

Generative models have been successfully used for generating realistic signals. Because the likelihood function is typically intractable in most of these models, the common practice is to use "implicit" models that avoid likelihood…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Itai Alon , Amir Globerson , Ami Wiesel

Policy Mirror Descent (PMD) is a popular framework in reinforcement learning, serving as a unifying perspective that encompasses numerous algorithms. These algorithms are derived through the selection of a mirror map and enjoy finite-time…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-07 Carlo Alfano , Sebastian Towers , Silvia Sapora , Chris Lu , Patrick Rebeschini

Policy gradient methods are widely adopted reinforcement learning algorithms for tasks with continuous action spaces. These methods succeeded in many application domains, however, because of their notorious sample inefficiency their use…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-20 Davide Mambelli , Stephan Bongers , Onno Zoeter , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Frans A. Oliehoek