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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

An important property for lifelong-learning agents is the ability to combine existing skills to solve unseen tasks. In general, however, it is unclear how to compose skills in a principled way. We provide a "recipe" for optimal value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-13 Benjamin van Niekerk , Steven James , Adam Earle , Benjamin Rosman

Recently, safe reinforcement learning (RL) with the actor-critic structure for continuous control tasks has received increasing attention. It is still challenging to learn a near-optimal control policy with safety and convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Xinglong Zhang , Yaoqian Peng , Biao Luo , Wei Pan , Xin Xu , Haibin Xie

When using reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to evaluate a policy it is common, given a large state space, to introduce some form of approximation architecture for the value function (VF). The exact form of this architecture can have a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-03-06 Edward W. Barker , Charl J. Ras

In many real-world applications, reinforcement learning (RL) agents might have to solve multiple tasks, each one typically modeled via a reward function. If reward functions are expressed linearly, and the agent has previously learned a set…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Lucas N. Alegre , Ana L. C. Bazzan , Bruno C. da Silva

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have exhibited great potential in solving single-task sequential decision-making problems with high-dimensional observations and long horizons, but are known to be hard to generalize across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Boyuan Chen , Chuning Zhu , Pulkit Agrawal , Kaiqing Zhang , Abhishek Gupta

The ability to exploit prior experience to solve novel problems rapidly is a hallmark of biological learning systems and of great practical importance for artificial ones. In the meta reinforcement learning literature much recent work has…

In this paper, we argue that the prevailing approach to training and evaluating machine learning models often fails to consider their real-world application within organizational or societal contexts, where they are intended to create…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Burcu Sayin , Jie Yang , Xinyue Chen , Andrea Passerini , Fabio Casati

Social goods, such as healthcare, smart city, and information networks, often produce ordered event data in continuous time. The generative processes of these event data can be very complex, requiring flexible models to capture their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-29 Shuang Li , Shuai Xiao , Shixiang Zhu , Nan Du , Yao Xie , Le Song

We consider a problem of learning the reward and policy from expert examples under unknown dynamics. Our proposed method builds on the framework of generative adversarial networks and introduces the empowerment-regularized maximum-entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Ahmed H. Qureshi , Byron Boots , Michael C. Yip

Reinforcement learning is a framework for learning to act sequentially in an unknown environment. We propose a natural approach for modeling policy structure in policy gradients. The key idea is to optimize for a subset of future rewards:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Puneet Mathur , Branislav Kveton , Subhojyoti Mukherjee , Viet Dac Lai

Improving data utilization efficiency is critical for scaling reinforcement learning (RL) for long-horizon tasks where generating trajectories is expensive. However, the dominant RL methods for LLMs are largely on-policy: they update each…

Designing reward functions for continuous-control robotics often leads to subtle misalignments or reward hacking, especially in complex tasks. Preference-based RL mitigates some of these pitfalls by learning rewards from comparative…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Anukriti Singh , Amisha Bhaskar , Peihong Yu , Souradip Chakraborty , Ruthwik Dasyam , Amrit Bedi , Pratap Tokekar

The beneficial effects of treatments vary across individuals in most studies. Treatment heterogeneity motivates practitioners to search for the optimal policy based on personal characteristics. A long-standing common practice in policy…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-01-06 Xuqiao Li , Ying Yan

Recent advances in language modeling and vision stem from training large models on diverse, multi-task data. This paradigm has had limited impact in value-based reinforcement learning (RL), where improvements are often driven by small…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan , Carmelo Sferrazza , Aviral Kumar , Pieter Abbeel

In reinforcement learning an agent interacts with the environment by taking actions and observing the next state and reward. When sampled probabilistically, these state transitions, rewards, and actions can all induce randomness in the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-30 Will Dabney , Mark Rowland , Marc G. Bellemare , Rémi Munos

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become the de facto standard practice for sequential decision-making problems by improving future acting policies with feedback. However, RL algorithms may require extensive trial-and-error interactions to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Shenao Zhang , Sirui Zheng , Shuqi Ke , Zhihan Liu , Wanxin Jin , Jianbo Yuan , Yingxiang Yang , Hongxia Yang , Zhaoran Wang

We study the problem of off-policy value evaluation in reinforcement learning (RL), where one aims to estimate the value of a new policy based on data collected by a different policy. This problem is often a critical step when applying RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-27 Nan Jiang , Lihong Li

Unlike reinforcement learning (RL) agents, humans remain capable multitaskers in changing environments. In spite of only experiencing the world through their own observations and interactions, people know how to balance focusing on tasks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Rishav Bhagat , Jonathan Balloch , Zhiyu Lin , Julia Kim , Mark Riedl

Flow Matching (FM) has shown remarkable ability in modeling complex distributions and achieves strong performance in offline imitation learning for cloning expert behaviors. However, despite its behavioral cloning expressiveness, FM-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Zhenglin Wan , Jingxuan Wu , Xingrui Yu , Chubin Zhang , Mingcong Lei , Bo An , Ivor Tsang