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Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) improves the efficiency of long-horizon reinforcement-learning tasks with sparse rewards by decomposing the task into a hierarchy of subgoals. The main challenge of HRL is efficient discovery of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Sadegh Khorasani , Saber Salehkaleybar , Negar Kiyavash , Matthias Grossglauser

This paper introduces an algorithm for discovering implicit and delayed causal relations between events observed by a robot at arbitrary times, with the objective of improving data-efficiency and interpretability of model-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-05 Junchi Liang , Abdeslam Boularias

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging sequential decision making and control tasks. In this paper, we classify RL into direct and indirect RL according to how they seek the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-12 Yang Guan , Shengbo Eben Li , Jingliang Duan , Jie Li , Yangang Ren , Qi Sun , Bo Cheng

Causal reasoning is increasingly used in Reinforcement Learning (RL) to improve the learning process in several dimensions: efficacy of learned policies, efficiency of convergence, generalisation capabilities, safety and interpretability of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Giovanni Briglia , Stefano Mariani , Franco Zambonelli

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Philippe Morere , Gilad Francis , Tom Blau , Fabio Ramos

Causal discovery for purely observational, categorical data is a long-standing challenging problem. Unlike continuous data, the vast majority of existing methods for categorical data focus on inferring the Markov equivalence class only,…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-12-20 Yang Ni , Bani Mallick

Model-based methods have recently shown promising for offline reinforcement learning (RL), aiming to learn good policies from historical data without interacting with the environment. Previous model-based offline RL methods learn fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-06 Zheng-Mao Zhu , Xiong-Hui Chen , Hong-Long Tian , Kun Zhang , Yang Yu

Generating explanations for reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging as actions may produce long-term effects on the future. In this paper, we develop a novel framework for explainable RL by learning a causal world model without prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-19 Zhongwei Yu , Jingqing Ruan , Dengpeng Xing

Ordinal regression and ranking are challenging due to inherent ordinal dependencies that conventional methods struggle to model. We propose Ranking-Aware Reinforcement Learning (RARL), a novel RL framework that explicitly learns these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Aiming Hao , Chen Zhu , Jiashu Zhu , Jiahong Wu , Xiangxiang Chu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is typically concerned with estimating stationary policies or single-step models, leveraging the Markov property to factorize problems in time. However, we can also view RL as a generic sequence modeling problem,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Michael Janner , Qiyang Li , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the careful design of the reward function. However, accurately assigning rewards to each state-action pair in Long-Term Reinforcement Learning (LTRL) tasks remains a significant challenge. As a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Qi Ju , Falin Hei , Zhemei Fang , Yunfeng Luo

We study a class of reinforcement learning (RL) tasks where the objective of the agent is to accomplish temporally extended goals. In this setting, a common approach is to represent the tasks as deterministic finite automata (DFA) and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Yash Paliwal , Rajarshi Roy , Jean-Raphaël Gaglione , Nasim Baharisangari , Daniel Neider , Xiaoming Duan , Ufuk Topcu , Zhe Xu

We design a new iterative algorithm, called REINFORCE-OPT, for solving a general type of optimization problems. This algorithm parameterizes the solution search rule and iteratively updates the parameter using a reinforcement learning (RL)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-27 Chen Xu , Yun-Bin Zhao , Zhipeng Lu , Ye Zhang

A topic of great current interest is Causal Representation Learning (CRL), whose goal is to learn a causal model for hidden features in a data-driven manner. Unfortunately, CRL is severely ill-posed since it is a combination of the two…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-10 Hiroshi Morioka , Aapo Hyvärinen

Graph path search is a classic computer science problem that has been recently approached with Reinforcement Learning (RL) due to its potential to outperform prior methods. Existing RL techniques typically assume a global view of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-27 Alexei Pisacane , Victor-Alexandru Darvariu , Mirco Musolesi

Answering complex questions involving multiple entities and relations is a challenging task. Logically, the answer to a complex question should be derived by decomposing the complex question into multiple simple sub-questions and then…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-13 Yunan Zhang , Xiang Cheng , Yufeng Zhang , Zihan Wang , Zhengqi Fang , Xiaoyan Wang , Zhenya Huang , Chengxiang Zhai

Inducing causal relationships from observations is a classic problem in machine learning. Most work in causality starts from the premise that the causal variables themselves are observed. However, for AI agents such as robots trying to make…

We propose ordering-based approaches for learning the maximal ancestral graph (MAG) of a structural equation model (SEM) up to its Markov equivalence class (MEC) in the presence of unobserved variables. Existing ordering-based methods in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-16 Ehsan Mokhtarian , Mohammadsadegh Khorasani , Jalal Etesami , Negar Kiyavash

Despite recent progress in reinforcement learning (RL), RL algorithms for exploration still remain an active area of research. Existing methods often focus on state-based metrics, which do not consider the underlying causal structures of…

A key barrier to using reinforcement learning (RL) in many real-world applications is the requirement of a large number of system interactions to learn a good control policy. Off-policy and Offline RL methods have been proposed to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-02 Wenqi Cui , Linbin Huang , Weiwei Yang , Baosen Zhang