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As reinforcement learning agents are tasked with solving more challenging and diverse tasks, the ability to incorporate prior knowledge into the learning system and to exploit reusable structure in solution space is likely to become…

Solving tasks with sparse rewards is a main challenge in reinforcement learning. While hierarchical controllers are an intuitive approach to this problem, current methods often require manual reward shaping, alternating training phases, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-04 Alexander Pashevich , Danijar Hafner , James Davidson , Rahul Sukthankar , Cordelia Schmid

This paper deals with distributed policy optimization in reinforcement learning, which involves a central controller and a group of learners. In particular, two typical settings encountered in several applications are considered:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Tianyi Chen , Kaiqing Zhang , Georgios B. Giannakis , Tamer Başar

Traditionally, reinforcement learning methods predict the next action based on the current state. However, in many situations, directly applying actions to control systems or robots is dangerous and may lead to unexpected behaviors because…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Nan Lin , Yuxuan Li , Yujun Zhu , Ruolin Wang , Xiayu Zhang , Jianmin Ji , Keke Tang , Xiaoping Chen , Xinming Zhang

Reinforcement learning is a promising framework for solving control problems, but its use in practical situations is hampered by the fact that reward functions are often difficult to engineer. Specifying goals and tasks for autonomous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-22 Justin Fu , Anoop Korattikara , Sergey Levine , Sergio Guadarrama

A key task in Artificial Intelligence is learning effective policies for controlling agents in unknown environments to optimize performance measures. Off-policy learning methods, like Q-learning, allow learners to make optimal decisions…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Mingxuan Li , Junzhe Zhang , Elias Bareinboim

Deep Reinforcement Learning is a promising tool for robotic control, yet practical application is often hindered by the difficulty of designing effective reward functions. Real-world tasks typically require optimizing multiple objectives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Kilian Freitag , Knut Åkesson , Morteza Haghir Chehreghani

Off-policy learning methods seek to derive an optimal policy directly from a fixed dataset of prior interactions. This objective presents significant challenges, primarily due to the inherent distributional shift and value function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Arip Asadulaev , Maksim Bobrin , Salem Lahlou , Dmitry Dylov , Fakhri Karray , Martin Takac

The subject of this paper is reinforcement learning. Policies are considered here that produce actions based on states and random elements autocorrelated in subsequent time instants. Consequently, an agent learns from experiments that are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-11 Marcin Szulc , Jakub Łyskawa , Paweł Wawrzyński

Stateful policies play an important role in reinforcement learning, such as handling partially observable environments, enhancing robustness, or imposing an inductive bias directly into the policy structure. The conventional method for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Firas Al-Hafez , Guoping Zhao , Jan Peters , Davide Tateo

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to learn a reward function and a corresponding policy that best fit the demonstrated trajectories of an expert. However, current IRL works cannot learn incrementally from an ongoing trajectory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Shicheng Liu , Minghui Zhu

This paper proposes a policy-based deep reinforcement learning hyper-heuristic framework for solving the Job Shop Scheduling Problem. The hyper-heuristic agent learns to switch scheduling rules based on the system state dynamically. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Sofiene Lassoued , Asrat Gobachew , Stefan Lier , Andreas Schwung

To accumulate knowledge and improve its policy of behaviour, a reinforcement learning agent can learn `off-policy' about policies that differ from the policy used to generate its experience. This is important to learn counterfactuals, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Simon Schmitt , John Shawe-Taylor , Hado van Hasselt

Despite significant progress, deep reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from data-inefficiency and limited generalization. Recent efforts apply meta-learning to learn a meta-learner from a set of RL tasks such that a novel but related task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-05 Lin Lan , Zhenguo Li , Xiaohong Guan , Pinghui Wang

Reinforcement learning is a machine learning approach based on behavioral psychology. It is focused on learning agents that can acquire knowledge and learn to carry out new tasks by interacting with the environment. However, a problem…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Hugo Muñoz , Ernesto Portugal , Angel Ayala , Bruno Fernandes , Francisco Cruz

Transfer learning (TL) is a promising way to improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning. However, how to efficiently transfer knowledge across tasks with different state-action spaces is investigated at an early stage. Most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Yu Chen , Yingfeng Chen , Zhipeng Hu , Tianpei Yang , Changjie Fan , Yang Yu , Jianye Hao

A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-21 Paulo Rauber , Avinash Ummadisingu , Filipe Mutz , Juergen Schmidhuber

Designing agents that acquire knowledge autonomously and use it to solve new tasks efficiently is an important challenge in reinforcement learning. Knowledge acquired during an unsupervised pre-training phase is often transferred by…

Transfer learning can be applied in deep reinforcement learning to accelerate the training of a policy in a target task by transferring knowledge from a policy learned in a related source task. This is commonly achieved by copying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Joseph Campbell , Yue Guo , Fiona Xie , Simon Stepputtis , Katia Sycara

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are known to scale poorly to environments with many available actions, requiring numerous samples to learn an optimal policy. The traditional approach of considering the same fixed action space in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-15 Leo Ardon , Alberto Pozanco , Daniel Borrajo , Sumitra Ganesh