English
Related papers

Related papers: Useful Policy Invariant Shaping from Arbitrary Adv…

200 papers

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is proven powerful for decision making in simulated environments. However, training deep RL model is challenging in real world applications such as production-scale health-care or recommender systems because…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-14 Ge Liu , Rui Wu , Heng-Tze Cheng , Jing Wang , Jayden Ooi , Lihong Li , Ang Li , Wai Lok Sibon Li , Craig Boutilier , Ed Chi

Learning to solve sparse-reward reinforcement learning problems is difficult, due to the lack of guidance towards the goal. But in some problems, prior knowledge can be used to augment the learning process. Reward shaping is a way to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-14 Zhao Yang , Mike Preuss , Aske Plaat

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…

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), agents have no incentive to exhibit predictable behaviors, and are often pushed (through e.g. policy entropy regularisation) to randomise their actions in favor of exploration. This often makes it challenging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Daniel Jarne Ornia , Giannis Delimpaltadakis , Jens Kober , Javier Alonso-Mora

Imitation learning is an effective alternative approach to learn a policy when the reward function is sparse. In this paper, we consider a challenging setting where an agent and an expert use different actions from each other. We assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Konrad Zolna , Negar Rostamzadeh , Yoshua Bengio , Sungjin Ahn , Pedro O. Pinheiro

We study tabular reinforcement learning problems with multiple steps of lookahead information. Before acting, the learner observes $\ell$ steps of future transition and reward realizations: the exact state the agent would reach and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Nadav Merlis

This paper introduces a reinforcement learning framework that enables controllable and diverse player behaviors without relying on human gameplay data. Existing approaches often require large-scale player trajectories, train separate models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Atahan Cilan , Atay Özgövde

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) can enable robots to learn to perform tasks based on an individual's preferences without requiring a hand-crafted reward function. However, existing approaches either assume access to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Yi Liu , Gaurav Datta , Ellen Novoseller , Daniel S. Brown

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

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

Reinforcement learning (RL), a common tool in decision making, learns control policies from various experiences based on the associated cumulative return/rewards without treating them differently. Humans, on the contrary, often learn to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-25 Wuxia Chen , Taposh Banerjee , Jemin George , Carl Busart

A reinforcement learning agent tries to maximize its cumulative payoff by interacting in an unknown environment. It is important for the agent to explore suboptimal actions as well as to pick actions with highest known rewards. Yet, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-23 Reazul Hasan Russel

Modern recommender systems aim to improve user experience. As reinforcement learning (RL) naturally fits this objective -- maximizing an user's reward per session -- it has become an emerging topic in recommender systems. Developing…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Xin Xin , Tiago Pimentel , Alexandros Karatzoglou , Pengjie Ren , Konstantina Christakopoulou , Zhaochun Ren

Reinforcement Learning is a highly active research field with promising advancements. In the field of autonomous driving, however, often very simple scenarios are being examined. Common approaches use non-interpretable control commands as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Daniel Bogdoll , Jing Qin , Moritz Nekolla , Ahmed Abouelazm , Tim Joseph , J. Marius Zöllner

A fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning is to learn policies that generalize beyond the operating domains experienced during training. In this paper, we approach this challenge through the following invariance principle: an agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-10 Anoopkumar Sonar , Vincent Pacelli , Anirudha Majumdar

The complexity of designing reward functions has been a major obstacle to the wide application of deep reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. Describing an agent's desired behaviors and properties can be difficult, even for experts. A new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Wanqi Xue , Bo An , Shuicheng Yan , Zhongwen Xu

Strategy learning in game environments with multi-agent is a challenging problem. Since each agent's reward is determined by the joint strategy, a greedy learning strategy that aims to maximize its own reward may fall into a local optimum.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Xinyu Qiao , Yudong Hu , Congying Han , Weiyan Wu , Tiande Guo

Recommendation is crucial in both academia and industry, and various techniques are proposed such as content-based collaborative filtering, matrix factorization, logistic regression, factorization machines, neural networks and multi-armed…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Feng Liu , Ruiming Tang , Xutao Li , Weinan Zhang , Yunming Ye , Haokun Chen , Huifeng Guo , Yuzhou Zhang

Reinforcement learning agents learn by encouraging behaviours which maximize their total reward, usually provided by the environment. In many environments, however, the reward is provided after a series of actions rather than each single…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Mohammad Reza Bonyadi , Rui Wang , Maryam Ziaei