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Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) learns a reward function to explain expert demonstrations. Modern IRL methods often use the adversarial (minimax) formulation that alternates between reward and policy optimization, which often lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Yang Chen , Menglin Zou , Jiaqi Zhang , Yitan Zhang , Junyi Yang , Gael Gendron , Libo Zhang , Jiamou Liu , Michael J. Witbrock

Temporal abstractions in the form of options have been shown to help reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn faster. However, despite prior work on this topic, the problem of discovering options through interaction with an environment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Vivek Veeriah , Tom Zahavy , Matteo Hessel , Zhongwen Xu , Junhyuk Oh , Iurii Kemaev , Hado van Hasselt , David Silver , Satinder Singh

State-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically use random sampling (e.g., $\epsilon$-greedy) for exploration, but this method fails on hard exploration tasks like Montezuma's Revenge. To address the challenge of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Eric Chen , Zhang-Wei Hong , Joni Pajarinen , Pulkit Agrawal

This paper proposes a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for infinite horizon $\rm {H_{2}/H_{\infty}}$ problem in a class of stochastic discrete-time systems, rather than using a set of coupled generalized algebraic Riccati equations…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-28 Xiushan Jiang , Li Wang , Dongya Zhao , Ling Shi

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

Episodic self-imitation learning, a novel self-imitation algorithm with a trajectory selection module and an adaptive loss function, is proposed to speed up reinforcement learning. Compared to the original self-imitation learning algorithm,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-11-30 Tianhong Dai , Hengyan Liu , Anil Anthony Bharath

Observing a human demonstrator manipulate objects provides a rich, scalable and inexpensive source of data for learning robotic policies. However, transferring skills from human videos to a robotic manipulator poses several challenges, not…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Minttu Alakuijala , Gabriel Dulac-Arnold , Julien Mairal , Jean Ponce , Cordelia Schmid

In this paper, we address the discovery of robotic options from demonstrations in an unsupervised manner. Specifically, we present a framework to jointly learn low-level control policies and higher-level policies of how to use them from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Tanmay Shankar , Abhinav Gupta

The integration of Reinforcement Learning (RL) with heuristic methods is an emerging trend for solving optimization problems, which leverages RL's ability to learn from the data generated during the search process. One promising approach is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Arthur Müller , Lukas Vollenkemper

While deep reinforcement learning methods have shown impressive results in robot learning, their sample inefficiency makes the learning of complex, long-horizon behaviors with real robot systems infeasible. To mitigate this issue,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Taewook Nam , Shao-Hua Sun , Karl Pertsch , Sung Ju Hwang , Joseph J Lim

Hierarchical Instruction Following (HIF) refers to the problem of prompting large language models with a priority-ordered stack of instructions. Standard methods like RLHF and DPO typically fail in this problem since they mainly optimize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Keru Chen , Jun Luo , Sen Lin , Yingbin Liang , Alvaro Velasquez , Nathaniel Bastian , Shaofeng Zou

Reinforcement learning can greatly benefit from the use of options as a way of encoding recurring behaviours and to foster exploration. An important open problem is how can an agent autonomously learn useful options when solving particular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-07 Manuel Del Verme , Bruno Castro da Silva , Gianluca Baldassarre

In this work we present a novel approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning for linearly-solvable Markov decision processes. Our approach assumes that the state space is partitioned, and the subtasks consist in moving between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Guillermo Infante , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez

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

Visual model-based RL methods typically encode image observations into low-dimensional representations in a manner that does not eliminate redundant information. This leaves them susceptible to spurious variations -- changes in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Chuning Zhu , Max Simchowitz , Siri Gadipudi , Abhishek Gupta

Bilevel reinforcement learning (RL), which features intertwined two-level problems, has attracted growing interest recently. The inherent non-convexity of the lower-level RL problem is, however, to be an impediment to developing bilevel…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-28 Yan Yang , Bin Gao , Ya-xiang Yuan

Complex high-dimensional spaces with high Degree-of-Freedom and complicated action spaces, such as humanoid robots equipped with dexterous hands, pose significant challenges for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, which need to wisely…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Zifeng Zhuang , Diyuan Shi , Runze Suo , Xiao He , Hongyin Zhang , Ting Wang , Shangke Lyu , Donglin Wang

We investigate a narrow but common failure mode of GRPO-style reinforcement learning in the context of sparse verifiable rewards: early updates contain more responses with negative advantages than those with positive advantages, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Mohamed Sana , Nicola Piovesan , Antonio De Domenico , Fadhel Ayed , Haozhe Zhang

Tasks involving high-risk-high-return (HRHR) actions, such as obstacle crossing, often exhibit multimodal action distributions and stochastic returns. Most reinforcement learning (RL) methods assume unimodal Gaussian policies and rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Jundong Zhang , Yuhui Situ , Fanji Zhang , Rongji Deng , Tianqi Wei

Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning (AIRL) has shown promise in addressing the sparse reward problem in reinforcement learning (RL) by inferring dense reward functions from expert demonstrations. However, its performance in highly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Bram Silue , Santiago Amaya-Corredor , Patrick Mannion , Lander Willem , Pieter Libin