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Related papers: Model-free Policy Learning with Reward Gradients

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Reinforcement learning suffers from limitations in real practices primarily due to the number of required interactions with virtual environments. It results in a challenging problem because we are implausible to obtain a local optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Qizhen Wu , Kexin Liu , Lei Chen

Reinforcement learning methods require careful design involving a reward function to obtain the desired action policy for a given task. In the absence of hand-crafted reward functions, prior work on the topic has proposed several methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-16 Daiki Kimura , Subhajit Chaudhury , Ryuki Tachibana , Sakyasingha Dasgupta

Policy gradient methods have become one of the most popular classes of algorithms for multi-agent reinforcement learning. A key challenge, however, that is not addressed by many of these methods is multi-agent credit assignment: assessing…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-12-20 Jacopo Castellini , Sam Devlin , Frans A. Oliehoek , Rahul Savani

In this paper we propose a novel gradient algorithm to learn a policy from an expert's observed behavior assuming that the expert behaves optimally with respect to some unknown reward function of a Markovian Decision Problem. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-06-26 Gergely Neu , Csaba Szepesvari

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework which is suitable for both the batch RL setting and the setting where there are many reward functions of interest. During the exploration phase, an agent collects samples without using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ruosong Wang , Simon S. Du , Lin F. Yang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) considers the setting where the agent does not have access to a reward function during exploration, but must propose a near-optimal policy for an arbitrary reward function revealed only after…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Andrew Wagenmaker , Yifang Chen , Max Simchowitz , Simon S. Du , Kevin Jamieson

In reward-free reinforcement learning (RL), an agent explores the environment first without any reward information, in order to achieve certain learning goals afterwards for any given reward. In this paper we focus on reward-free RL under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Yuan Cheng , Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

Critical sectors of human society are progressing toward the adoption of powerful artificial intelligence (AI) agents, which are trained individually on behalf of self-interested principals but deployed in a shared environment. Short of…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Jiachen Yang , Ethan Wang , Rakshit Trivedi , Tuo Zhao , Hongyuan Zha

Reward machines are automaton-like structures that capture the memory required to accomplish a multi-stage task. When combined with reinforcement learning or optimal control methods, they can be used to synthesize robot policies to achieve…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Mohamad Louai Shehab , Antoine Aspeel , Necmiye Ozay

Training sophisticated agents for optimal decision-making under uncertainty has been key to the rapid development of modern autonomous systems across fields. Notably, model-free reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled decision-making agents…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Thomas Banker , Ali Mesbah

Policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning update policy parameters by taking steps in the direction of an estimated gradient of policy value. In this paper, we consider the statistically efficient estimation of policy gradients from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-21 Nathan Kallus , Masatoshi Uehara

Communication is fundamental to sustaining reciprocity and cooperation in strategic interactions. We identify and formulate the influence attribution problem as the central optimization difficulty inherent in such dynamics for a learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yue Lin , Pascal Poupart , Shuhui Zhu , Dan Qiao , Wenhao Li , Yuan Liu , Hongyuan Zha , Baoxiang Wang

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) can enable robots to learn to perform tasks based on an individual's preferences without requiring a hand-crafted reward function. However, existing approaches either assume access to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Yi Liu , Gaurav Datta , Ellen Novoseller , Daniel S. Brown

Model-based reinforcement learning has the potential to be more sample efficient than model-free approaches. However, existing model-based methods are vulnerable to model bias, which leads to poor generalization and asymptotic performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-27 Tung-Long Vuong , Kenneth Tran

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents continually interact with the environment and use the feedback to refine their behavior. To guide policy optimization, reward models are introduced as proxies of the desired objectives, such that when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Rui Yu , Shenghua Wan , Yucen Wang , Chen-Xiao Gao , Le Gan , Zongzhang Zhang , De-Chuan Zhan

We develop a method for policy architecture search and adaptation via gradient-free optimization which can learn to perform autonomous driving tasks. By learning from both demonstration and environmental reward we develop a model that can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-10-18 Sayna Ebrahimi , Anna Rohrbach , Trevor Darrell

Policy gradient methods have shown success in learning control policies for high-dimensional dynamical systems. Their biggest downside is the amount of exploration they require before yielding high-performing policies. In a lifelong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Jorge A. Mendez , Boyu Wang , Eric Eaton

Consider an auto-regressive model that produces outputs x (e.g., answers to questions, molecules) each of which can be summarized by an attribute vector y (e.g., helpfulness vs. harmlessness, or bio-availability vs. lipophilicity). An…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Alexander Peysakhovich , William Berman

Model-based Reinforcement Learning approaches have the promise of being sample efficient. Much of the progress in learning dynamics models in RL has been made by learning models via supervised learning. But traditional model-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-12 Shagun Sodhani , Anirudh Goyal , Tristan Deleu , Yoshua Bengio , Sergey Levine , Jian Tang

Self-interested individuals often fail to cooperate, posing a fundamental challenge for multi-agent learning. How can we achieve cooperation among self-interested, independent learning agents? Promising recent work has shown that in certain…