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One of the fundamental challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) is the one of data efficiency: modern algorithms require a very large number of training samples, especially compared to humans, for solving environments with high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-10 Hlynur Davíð Hlynsson , Laurenz Wiskott

Successor Features (SF) combined with Generalized Policy Improvement (GPI) provide a robust framework for transfer learning in Reinforcement Learning (RL) by decoupling environment dynamics from reward functions. However, standard SF…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Ritish Shrirao , Aditya Priyadarshi , Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi

Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) methods can successfully solve a wide range of sequential decision problems. However, learning policies that can generalize predictably across multiple tasks in a setting with non-Markovian reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Guillermo Infante , David Kuric , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez , Herke van Hoof

Representation learning is a central challenge across a range of machine learning areas. In reinforcement learning, effective and functional representations have the potential to tremendously accelerate learning progress and solve more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-30 Dibya Ghosh , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine

The objective of transfer reinforcement learning is to generalize from a set of previous tasks to unseen new tasks. In this work, we focus on the transfer scenario where the dynamics among tasks are the same, but their goals differ.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-04-12 Chen Ma , Junfeng Wen , Yoshua Bengio

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

We consider the problem of building a state representation model in a continual fashion. As the environment changes, the aim is to efficiently compress the sensory state's information without losing past knowledge. The learned features are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-12 Hugo Caselles-Dupré , Michael Garcia-Ortiz , David Filliat

In recent years, the successor representation (SR) has attracted increasing attention in reinforcement learning (RL), and it has been used to address some of its key challenges, such as exploration, credit assignment, and generalization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Hon Tik Tse , Siddarth Chandrasekar , Marlos C. Machado

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

In reinforcement learning, universal successor features (SFs) are a way to provide zero-shot adaptation to new tasks at test time: they provide optimal policies for all downstream reward functions lying in the linear span of a set of base…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Yann Ollivier

We study the problem of learning a good set of policies, so that when combined together, they can solve a wide variety of unseen reinforcement learning tasks with no or very little new data. Specifically, we consider the framework of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Safa Alver , Doina Precup

We present a temporally extended variation of the successor representation, which we term t-SR. t-SR captures the expected state transition dynamics of temporally extended actions by constructing successor representations over primitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Matthew J. Sargent , Peter J. Bentley , Caswell Barry , William de Cothi

Reasoning at multiple levels of temporal abstraction is one of the key attributes of intelligence. In reinforcement learning, this is often modeled through temporally extended courses of actions called options. Options allow agents to make…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-13 Marlos C. Machado , Andre Barreto , Doina Precup , Michael Bowling

In value-based reinforcement learning (RL), unlike in supervised learning, the agent faces not a single, stationary, approximation problem, but a sequence of value prediction problems. Each time the policy improves, the nature of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Will Dabney , André Barreto , Mark Rowland , Robert Dadashi , John Quan , Marc G. Bellemare , David Silver

Language models are typically trained to predict the next token in a sequence. Here, we explore an alternative predictive principle from reinforcement learning: Successor Representations (SRs), which model the expected discounted…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Mathis Immertreu , Achim Schilling , Thomas Kinfe , Patrick Krauss

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

In reinforcement learning, state representations are used to tractably deal with large problem spaces. State representations serve both to approximate the value function with few parameters, but also to generalize to newly encountered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-02 Charline Le Lan , Stephen Tu , Adam Oberman , Rishabh Agarwal , Marc G. Bellemare

Learning good representations of historical contexts is one of the core challenges of reinforcement learning (RL) in partially observable environments. While self-predictive auxiliary tasks have been shown to improve performance in fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Jeongyeol Kwon , Liu Yang , Robert Nowak , Josiah Hanna

Sample efficiency and risk-awareness are central to the development of practical reinforcement learning (RL) for complex decision-making. The former can be addressed by transfer learning and the latter by optimizing some utility function of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Michael Gimelfarb , André Barreto , Scott Sanner , Chi-Guhn Lee

The effectiveness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) depends on an animal's ability to assign credit for rewards to the appropriate preceding stimuli. One aspect of understanding the neural underpinnings of this process involves understanding…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2019-10-08 Jesse P. Geerts , Kimberly L. Stachenfeld , Neil Burgess