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This article introduces the theory of offline reinforcement learning in large state spaces, where good policies are learned from historical data without online interactions with the environment. Key concepts introduced include expressivity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Nan Jiang , Tengyang Xie

Transfer in Reinforcement Learning (RL) refers to the idea of applying knowledge gained from previous tasks to solving related tasks. Learning a universal value function (Schaul et al., 2015), which generalizes over goals and states, has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-14 Chen Ma , Dylan R. Ashley , Junfeng Wen , Yoshua Bengio

Learning world models offers a promising avenue for goal-conditioned reinforcement learning with sparse rewards. By allowing agents to plan actions or exploratory goals without direct interaction with the environment, world models enhance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Yuanlin Duan , Wensen Mao , He Zhu

Reinforcement learning algorithms describe how an agent can learn an optimal action policy in a sequential decision process, through repeated experience. In a given environment, the agent policy provides him some running and terminal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-03-24 Arthur Charpentier , Romuald Elie , Carl Remlinger

In model-based reinforcement learning, generative and temporal models of environments can be leveraged to boost agent performance, either by tuning the agent's representations during training or via use as part of an explicit planning…

We study reinforcement learning for global decision-making in the presence of local agents, where the global decision-maker makes decisions affecting all local agents, and the objective is to learn a policy that maximizes the joint rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Emile Anand , Guannan Qu

The successor representation (SR) provides a powerful framework for decoupling predictive dynamics from rewards, enabling rapid generalisation across reward configurations. However, the classical SR is limited by its inherent policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Changmin Yu , Máté Lengyel

Non-stationary environments pose a fundamental challenge for deep reinforcement learning, as changes in dynamics or rewards invalidate learned value functions and cause catastrophic forgetting. We propose \emph{Gradient-Boosted Deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Chang-Hwan Lee , Chanseung Lee

Exogenous state variables and rewards can slow reinforcement learning by injecting uncontrolled variation into the reward signal. This paper formalizes exogenous state variables and rewards and shows that if the reward function decomposes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 George Trimponias , Thomas G. Dietterich

Despite recent successes in Reinforcement Learning, value-based methods often suffer from high variance hindering performance. In this paper, we illustrate this in a continuous control setting where state of the art methods perform poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-24 Pierre Thodoroff , Nishanth Anand , Lucas Caccia , Doina Precup , Joelle Pineau

Humans decompose novel complex tasks into simpler ones to exploit previously learned skills. Analogously, hierarchical reinforcement learning seeks to leverage lower-level policies for simple tasks to solve complex ones. However, because…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Ju-Seung Byun , Andrew Perrault

Scaling end-to-end reinforcement learning to control real robots from vision presents a series of challenges, in particular in terms of sample efficiency. Against end-to-end learning, state representation learning can help learn a compact,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Antonin Raffin , Ashley Hill , René Traoré , Timothée Lesort , Natalia Díaz-Rodríguez , David Filliat

Most reinforcement learning (RL) methods only focus on learning a single task from scratch and are not able to use prior knowledge to learn other tasks more effectively. Context-based meta RL techniques are recently proposed as a possible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Xu Han , Feng Wu

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is challenging because an agent can rarely obtain non-zero rewards and hence, gradient-based optimization of parameterized policies can be incremental and slow. Recent work demonstrated that using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yijie Guo , Jongwook Choi , Marcin Moczulski , Shengyu Feng , Samy Bengio , Mohammad Norouzi , Honglak Lee

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms struggle with learning optimal policies for tasks where reward feedback is sparse and depends on a complex sequence of events in the environment. Probabilistic reward machines (PRMs) are finite-state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jan Corazza , Hadi Partovi Aria , Daniel Neider , Zhe Xu

In traditional statistical learning, data points are usually assumed to be independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) following an unknown probability distribution. This paper presents a contrasting viewpoint, perceiving data points…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Yangchen Pan , Junfeng Wen , Chenjun Xiao , Philip Torr

The ability to transfer skills across tasks has the potential to scale up reinforcement learning (RL) agents to environments currently out of reach. Recently, a framework based on two ideas, successor features (SFs) and generalised policy…

Value function learning plays a central role in many state-of-the-art reinforcement-learning algorithms. Many popular algorithms like Q-learning do not optimize any objective function, but are fixed-point iterations of some variant of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Yihao Feng , Lihong Li , Qiang Liu

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