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Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is successful in solving many complex Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) problems. However, agents often face unanticipated environmental changes after deployment in the real world. These changes are often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Beining Han , Chongyi Zheng , Harris Chan , Keiran Paster , Michael R. Zhang , Jimmy Ba

Recently, there are many efforts attempting to learn useful policies for continuous control in visual reinforcement learning (RL). In this scenario, it is important to learn a generalizable policy, as the testing environment may differ from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Jiafei Lyu , Le Wan , Xiu Li , Zongqing Lu

Machine learning (ML) formalizes the problem of getting computers to learn from experience as optimization of performance according to some metric(s) on a set of data examples. This is in contrast to requiring behaviour specified in advance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Tegan Maharaj

Biological evolution has distilled the experiences of many learners into the general learning algorithms of humans. Our novel meta reinforcement learning algorithm MetaGenRL is inspired by this process. MetaGenRL distills the experiences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-17 Louis Kirsch , Sjoerd van Steenkiste , Jürgen Schmidhuber

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) learns to make decisions on multiple levels of temporal abstraction. A key challenge in HRL is that the low-level policy changes over time, making it difficult for the high-level policy to generate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Vivienne Huiling Wang , Tinghuai Wang , Joni Pajarinen

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) concerns the problem of training an agent to maximize the probability of reaching target goal states. This paper presents an analysis of the goal-conditioned setting based on optimal control. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Nathan P. Lawrence , Ali Mesbah

The reinforcement learning (RL) problem is rife with sources of non-stationarity, making it a notoriously difficult problem domain for the application of neural networks. We identify a mechanism by which non-stationary prediction targets…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-05 Clare Lyle , Mark Rowland , Will Dabney

The generalization gap in reinforcement learning (RL) has been a significant obstacle that prevents the RL agent from learning general skills and adapting to varying environments. Increasing the generalization capacity of the RL systems can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Hanping Zhang , Yuhong Guo

Reinforcement learning agents tend to develop habits that are effective only under specific policies. Following an initial exploration phase where agents try out different actions, they eventually converge onto a particular policy. As this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Miguel Suau , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Frans A. Oliehoek

Out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation is challenging because it involves not only learning from empirical data, but also deciding among various notions of generalisation, e.g., optimising the average-case risk, worst-case risk, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Anurag Singh , Siu Lun Chau , Shahine Bouabid , Krikamol Muandet

Reward functions, learned or manually specified, are rarely perfect. Instead of accurately expressing human goals, these reward functions are often distorted by human beliefs about how best to achieve those goals. Specifically, these reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Henrik Marklund , Alex Infanger , Benjamin Van Roy

Visual Reinforcement Learning (Visual RL), coupled with high-dimensional observations, has consistently confronted the long-standing challenge of out-of-distribution generalization. Despite the focus on algorithms aimed at resolving visual…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-09-27 Zhecheng Yuan , Sizhe Yang , Pu Hua , Can Chang , Kaizhe Hu , Huazhe Xu

It can largely benefit the reinforcement learning (RL) process of each agent if multiple geographically distributed agents perform their separate RL tasks cooperatively. Different from multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Kaiyue Wu , Xiao-Jun Zeng

While humans readily generalize abstract concepts to more complex or larger tasks, building Reinforcement Learning (RL) systems with this ability remains elusive. Here, we present the first theoretical model of how such Out-of-Distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Nasehatul Mustakim , Lucas Lehnert

Understanding generalization in reinforcement learning (RL) is a significant challenge, as many common assumptions of traditional supervised learning theory do not apply. We focus on the special class of reparameterizable RL problems, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Huan Wang , Stephan Zheng , Caiming Xiong , Richard Socher

Generalizability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents (ability to perform on environments different from the ones they have been trained on) is a key problem as agents have the tendency to overfit to their training environments. In order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Olivier Moulin , Vincent Francois-lavet , Paul Elbers , Mark Hoogendoorn

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising direction for training agents that are capable of solving multiple tasks and reach a diverse set of objectives. How to \textit{specify} and \textit{ground} these goals in such a…

Solving a reinforcement learning (RL) problem poses two competing challenges: fitting a potentially discontinuous value function, and generalizing well to new observations. In this paper, we analyze the learning dynamics of temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Clare Lyle , Mark Rowland , Will Dabney , Marta Kwiatkowska , Yarin Gal

Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL) can enable agents to spontaneously set diverse goals to learn a set of skills. Despite the excellent works proposed in various fields, reaching distant goals in temporally extended tasks…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Zhifeng Qian , Mingyu You , Hongjun Zhou , Xuanhui Xu , Bin He

We prove a fundamental limitation on the efficiency of a wide class of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. This limitation applies to model-free RL methods as well as a broad range of model-based methods, such as planning with tree…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-29 Brieuc Pinon , Raphaël Jungers , Jean-Charles Delvenne