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The shortcomings of maximum likelihood estimation in the context of model-based reinforcement learning have been highlighted by an increasing number of papers. When the model class is misspecified or has a limited representational capacity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Evgenii Nikishin , Romina Abachi , Rishabh Agarwal , Pierre-Luc Bacon

We present the first model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm to synthesise policies for an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), such that a linear time property is satisfied. The given temporal property is converted into a Limit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Mohammadhosein Hasanbeig , Alessandro Abate , Daniel Kroening

In many practical applications of RL, it is expensive to observe state transitions from the environment. For example, in the problem of plasma control for nuclear fusion, computing the next state for a given state-action pair requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Viraj Mehta , Biswajit Paria , Jeff Schneider , Stefano Ermon , Willie Neiswanger

The aim of this paper is to study the reward based policy exploration problem in a supervised learning approach and enable robots to form complex movement trajectories in challenging reward settings and search spaces. For this, the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-10 M. Tuluhan Akbulut , Utku Bozdogan , Ahmet Tekden , Emre Ugur

This study focuses on the topic of offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), a variant of conventional reinforcement learning that dispenses with the need for online interaction or specification of reward functions. Instead,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Yachen Kang , Diyuan Shi , Jinxin Liu , Li He , Donglin Wang

Zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to learn a family of policies from a reward-free dataset, and recover optimal policies for any reward function directly at test time. Naturally, the quality of the pretraining dataset…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Jiajun Hu , Nuria Armengol Urpi , Jin Cheng , Stelian Coros

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) requires a large number of trials to learn a good policy, especially in environments with sparse rewards. We explore a method to improve the sample efficiency when we have access to demonstrations. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-22 Cinjon Resnick , Roberta Raileanu , Sanyam Kapoor , Alexander Peysakhovich , Kyunghyun Cho , Joan Bruna

In reinforcement learning, temporal difference-based algorithms can be sample-inefficient: for instance, with sparse rewards, no learning occurs until a reward is observed. This can be remedied by learning richer objects, such as a model of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Léonard Blier , Corentin Tallec , Yann Ollivier

An optimal feedback controller for a given Markov decision process (MDP) can in principle be synthesized by value or policy iteration. However, if the system dynamics and the reward function are unknown, a learning agent must discover an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-19 Boris Belousov , Jan Peters

This paper introduces an approach to Reinforcement Learning Algorithm by comparing their immediate rewards using a variation of Q-Learning algorithm. Unlike the conventional Q-Learning, the proposed algorithm compares current reward with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2010-09-15 Punit Pandey , Deepshikha Pandey , Shishir Kumar

Reinforcement learning (RL) typically defines a discount factor as part of the Markov Decision Process. The discount factor values future rewards by an exponential scheme that leads to theoretical convergence guarantees of the Bellman…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-01 William Fedus , Carles Gelada , Yoshua Bengio , Marc G. Bellemare , Hugo Larochelle

We study reinforcement learning (RL) with no-reward demonstrations, a setting in which an RL agent has access to additional data from the interaction of other agents with the same environment. However, it has no access to the rewards or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-11 Angelos Filos , Clare Lyle , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine , Natasha Jaques , Gregory Farquhar

Many strategic decision-making problems, such as environment design for warehouse robots, can be naturally formulated as bi-level reinforcement learning (RL), where a leader agent optimizes its objective while a follower solves a Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Mikoto Kudo , Takumi Tanabe , Akifumi Wachi , Youhei Akimoto

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) addresses the problem of recovering a task description given a demonstration of the optimal policy used to solve such a task. The optimal policy is usually provided by an expert or teacher, making IRL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-02-09 Héctor Ratia , Luis Montesano , Ruben Martinez-Cantin

Inverse reinforcement learning attempts to reconstruct the reward function in a Markov decision problem, using observations of agent actions. As already observed in Russell [1998] the problem is ill-posed, and the reward function is not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-09 Haoyang Cao , Samuel N. Cohen , Lukasz Szpruch

Despite the significant advances in Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) observed in the last decade, the amount of training experience necessary to learn effective policies remains one of the primary concerns in both simulated and real…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Manuel Serra Nunes , Atabak Dehban , Yiannis Demiris , José Santos-Victor

For continuing environments, reinforcement learning (RL) methods commonly maximize the discounted reward criterion with discount factor close to 1 in order to approximate the average reward (the gain). However, such a criterion only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Vektor Dewanto , Marcus Gallagher

Multi-objective Markov decision processes are sequential decision-making problems that involve multiple conflicting reward functions that cannot be optimized simultaneously without a compromise. This type of problems cannot be solved by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Sherif Abdelfattah , Kathryn Merrick , Jiankun Hu

This paper studies the continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL) for optimal switching problems across multiple regimes. We consider a type of exploratory formulation under entropy regularization where the agent randomizes both the timing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-23 Yijie Huang , Mengge Li , Xiang Yu , Zhou Zhou

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find optimal policies in dynamic environments in order to maximize the expected total rewards by leveraging pre-collected data. Learning from heterogeneous data is one of the fundamental…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-10 Rui Miao , Babak Shahbaba , Annie Qu