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Autonomous exploration of cluttered environments requires efficient exploration strategies that guarantee safety against potential collisions with unknown random obstacles. This paper presents a novel approach combining a graph neural…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Gabriele Calzolari , Vidya Sumathy , Christoforos Kanellakis , George Nikolakopoulos

Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems often have access to sparse rewards where the agent receives a reward signal only when it has achieved the goal, making policy optimization a difficult problem. Several works augment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Siddhant Agarwal , Ishan Durugkar , Peter Stone , Amy Zhang

We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Nithia Vijayan , Prashanth L. A

In this paper, we investigate preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), which enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn from human feedback. This is particularly valuable when defining a fine-grain reward function is not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Guojian Wang , Jianxiang Liu , Xinyuan Li , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Tianyuan Chen , Xuyang Chen

Researchers have demonstrated that Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a powerful tool for finding policies that perform well on complex robotic systems. However, these policies are often unpredictable and can induce highly variable…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Sean Gillen , Asutay Ozmen , Katie Byl

The shortcomings of maximum likelihood estimation in the context of model-based reinforcement learning have been highlighted by an increasing number of papers. When the model class is misspecified or has a limited representational capacity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Evgenii Nikishin , Romina Abachi , Rishabh Agarwal , Pierre-Luc Bacon

This paper presents a model-based reinforcement learning (RL) framework for optimal closed-loop control of nonlinear robotic systems. The proposed approach learns linear lifted dynamics through Koopman operator theory and integrates the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Wenjian Hao , Yuxuan Fang , Zehui Lu , Shaoshuai Mou

In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning-based algorithm for trajectory optimization for constrained dynamical systems. This problem is motivated by the fact that for most robotic systems, the dynamics may not always be known.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-05 Kei Ota , Devesh K. Jha , Tomoaki Oiki , Mamoru Miura , Takashi Nammoto , Daniel Nikovski , Toshisada Mariyama

This work studies a Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem in which we are given a set of trajectories collected with K baseline policies. Each of these policies can be quite suboptimal in isolation, and have strong performance in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-29 Teodor V. Marinov , Alekh Agarwal , Mircea Trofin

Off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) holds the promise of better data efficiency as it allows sample reuse and potentially enables safe interaction with the environment. Current off-policy policy gradient methods either suffer from high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Samuele Tosatto , João Carvalho , Jan Peters

A key barrier to using reinforcement learning (RL) in many real-world applications is the requirement of a large number of system interactions to learn a good control policy. Off-policy and Offline RL methods have been proposed to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-02 Wenqi Cui , Linbin Huang , Weiwei Yang , Baosen Zhang

We study the problem of deployment efficient reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation under the \emph{reward-free} exploration setting. This is a well-motivated problem because deploying new policies is costly in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Dan Qiao , Yu-Xiang Wang

The off-policy learning paradigm allows for recommender systems and general ranking applications to be framed as decision-making problems, where we aim to learn decision policies that optimize an unbiased offline estimate of an online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-15 Shashank Gupta , Olivier Jeunen , Harrie Oosterhuis , Maarten de Rijke

In constrained reinforcement learning (C-RL), an agent seeks to learn from the environment a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying minimum requirements in secondary cumulative reward constraints. Several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Tianqi Zheng , Pengcheng You , Enrique Mallada

Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning and continuous control problems are a popular approach for a variety of reasons: 1) they are easy to implement without explicit knowledge of the underlying model 2) they are an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-26 Maryam Fazel , Rong Ge , Sham M. Kakade , Mehran Mesbahi

Reinforcement learning has been established over the past decade as an effective tool to find optimal control policies for dynamical systems, with recent focus on approaches that guarantee safety during the learning and/or execution phases.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-10-06 S M Nahid Mahmud , Scott A Nivison , Zachary I. Bell , Rushikesh Kamalapurkar

Optimal control problem is typically solved by first finding the value function through Hamilton-Jacobi equation (HJE) and then taking the minimizer of the Hamiltonian to obtain the control. In this work, instead of focusing on the value…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-10 Alain Bensoussan , Jiayue Han , Sheung Chi Phillip Yam , Xiang Zhou

We consider a new form of reinforcement learning (RL) that is based on opportunities to directly learn the optimal control policy and a general Markov decision process (MDP) framework devised to support these opportunities. Derivations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-02 Yingdong Lu , Mark S. Squillante , Chai Wah Wu

Merely pursuing performance may adversely affect the safety, while a conservative policy for safe exploration will degrade the performance. How to balance the safety and performance in learning-based control problems is an interesting yet…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-28 Xinyang Wang , Hongwei Zhang , Shimin Wang , Wei Xiao , Martin Guay

We propose a metalearning approach for learning gradient-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. The idea is to evolve a differentiable loss function, such that an agent, which optimizes its policy to minimize this loss, will achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-01 Rein Houthooft , Richard Y. Chen , Phillip Isola , Bradly C. Stadie , Filip Wolski , Jonathan Ho , Pieter Abbeel