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Related papers: Model-free Policy Learning with Reward Gradients

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The ability of reinforcement learning algorithms to learn effective policies is determined by the rewards available during training. However, for practical problems, obtaining large quantities of reward labels is often infeasible due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Shreyas Chaudhari , Renhao Zhang , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

Leveraging machine learning methods to solve constraint satisfaction problems has shown promising, but they are mostly limited to a static situation where the problem description is completely known and fixed from the beginning. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Wook Lee , Frans A. Oliehoek

In Reinforcement Learning (abbreviated as RL), an agent interacts with the environment via a set of possible actions, and a reward is generated from some unknown distribution. The task here is to find an optimal set of actions such that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Aditi Anand , Suman Banerjee , Dildar Ali

Dialogue policy optimization often obtains feedback until task completion in task-oriented dialogue systems. This is insufficient for training intermediate dialogue turns since supervision signals (or rewards) are only provided at the end…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-12 Xinting Huang , Jianzhong Qi , Yu Sun , Rui Zhang

Model-based reinforcement learning methods learn a dynamics model with real data sampled from the environment and leverage it to generate simulated data to derive an agent. However, due to the potential distribution mismatch between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-29 Jian Shen , Han Zhao , Weinan Zhang , Yong Yu

We study the problem of learning safe control policies that are also effective; i.e., maximizing the probability of satisfying a linear temporal logic (LTL) specification of a task, and the discounted reward capturing the (classic) control…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Alper Kamil Bozkurt , Yu Wang , Miroslav Pajic

Reinforcement learning means finding the optimal course of action in Markovian environments without knowledge of the environment's dynamics. Stochastic optimization algorithms used in the field rely on estimates of the value of a policy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-25 Leonid Peshkin , Sayan Mukherjee

We explore the methodology and theory of reward-directed generation via conditional diffusion models. Directed generation aims to generate samples with desired properties as measured by a reward function, which has broad applications in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-17 Hui Yuan , Kaixuan Huang , Chengzhuo Ni , Minshuo Chen , Mengdi Wang

Actor critic methods with sparse rewards in model-based deep reinforcement learning typically require a deterministic binary reward function that reflects only two possible outcomes: if, for each step, the goal has been achieved or not. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Juan Vargas , Lazar Andjelic , Amir Barati Farimani

Many sequential decision-making tasks involve optimizing multiple conflicting objectives, requiring policies that adapt to different user preferences. In multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL), one widely studied approach} addresses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Ying-Tu Chen , Wei Hung , Bing-Shu Wu , Zhang-Wei Hong , Ping-Chun Hsieh

A promising way to improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning is model-based methods, in which many explorations and evaluations can happen in the learned models to save real-world samples. However, when the learned model has a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-14 Haoxin Lin , Yihao Sun , Jiaji Zhang , Yang Yu

The goal of policy gradient approaches is to find a policy in a given class of policies which maximizes the expected return. Given a differentiable model of the policy, we want to apply a gradient-ascent technique to reach a local optimum.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-13 Mattis Manfred Kämmerer

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Vitchyr H. Pong , Rowan McAllister , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

In human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning or environments where calculating a reward is expensive, the costly rewards can make learning efficiency challenging to achieve. The cost of obtaining feedback from humans or calculating expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Muhammed Yusuf Satici , David L. Roberts

Reinforcement learning for embodied agents is a challenging problem. The accumulated reward to be optimized is often a very rugged function, and gradient methods are impaired by many local optimizers. We demonstrate, in an experimental…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-06-01 Guido Montufar , Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi , Nihat Ay

In this study, we present a transductive inference approach on that reward information propagation graph, which enables the effective estimation of rewards for unlabelled data in offline reinforcement learning. Reward inference is the key…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Bohao Qu , Xiaofeng Cao , Qing Guo , Yi Chang , Ivor W. Tsang , Chengqi Zhang

In computational reinforcement learning, a growing body of work seeks to express an agent's model of the world through predictions about future sensations. In this manuscript we focus on predictions expressed as General Value Functions:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Alex Kearney , Anna Koop , Johannes Günther , Patrick M. Pilarski

Model-free reinforcement learning based methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization, or Q-learning typically require thousands of interactions with the environment to approximate the optimum controller which may not always be feasible in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-16 Narendra Patwardhan , Zequn Wang

Autonomous cyber-physical agents and systems play an increasingly large role in our lives. To ensure that agents behave in ways aligned with the values of the societies in which they operate, we must develop techniques that allow these…