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Model free reinforcement learning suffers from the high sampling complexity inherent to robotic manipulation or locomotion tasks. Most successful approaches typically use random sampling strategies which leads to slow policy convergence. In…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-08-13 Miroslav Bogdanovic , Ludovic Righetti

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been proven its efficiency in capturing users' dynamic interests in recent literature. However, training a DRL agent is challenging, because of the sparse environment in recommender systems (RS), DRL…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Xiaocong Chen , Siyu Wang , Lina Yao , Lianyong Qi , Yong Li

This paper reviews exploration techniques in deep reinforcement learning. Exploration techniques are of primary importance when solving sparse reward problems. In sparse reward problems, the reward is rare, which means that the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Pawel Ladosz , Lilian Weng , Minwoo Kim , Hyondong Oh

Reward-biased maximum likelihood estimation (RBMLE) is a classic principle in the adaptive control literature for tackling explore-exploit trade-offs. This paper studies the stochastic contextual bandit problem with general bounded reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Yu-Heng Hung , Ping-Chun Hsieh

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems are fundamental in online decision-making and have been instrumental in finding an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs). Function approximations are usually deployed to handle large or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Jiashuo Jiang , Yiming Zong , Yinyu Ye

In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Grigorii Veviurko , Wendelin Böhmer , Mathijs de Weerdt

This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for decision processes with non-Markovian reward, in which high-level knowledge of the task in the form of reward machines is available to the learner. We consider probabilistic reward machines with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Hippolyte Bourel , Anders Jonsson , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Chenxiao Ma , Mohammad Sadegh Talebi

We consider the recently proposed reinforcement learning (RL) framework of Contextual Markov Decision Processes (CMDP), where the agent interacts with a (potentially adversarial) sequence of episodic tabular MDPs. In addition, a context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Aditya Modi , Ambuj Tewari

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods usually treat reward functions as black boxes. As such, these methods must extensively interact with the environment in order to discover rewards and optimal policies. In most RL applications, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Toryn Q. Klassen , Richard Valenzano , Sheila A. McIlraith

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) studies how to leverage environment statistics to learn useful behaviors without the cost of reward engineering. However, a central challenge in unsupervised RL is to extract behaviors that…

Realistic environments often provide agents with very limited feedback. When the environment is initially unknown, the feedback, in the beginning, can be completely absent, and the agents may first choose to devote all their effort on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Pierre Ménard , Omar Darwiche Domingues , Anders Jonsson , Emilie Kaufmann , Edouard Leurent , Michal Valko

The sim-to-real gap, where agents trained in a simulator face significant performance degradation during testing, is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning. Extansive works adopt the framework of distributionally robust RL, to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-12 Zewu Zheng , Yuanyuan Lin

In many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL), performing actions requires consuming certain types of resources that are non-replenishable in each episode. Typical applications include robotic control with limited energy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Zhihai Wang , Taoxing Pan , Qi Zhou , Jie Wang

Suppose an agent is in a (possibly unknown) Markov Decision Process in the absence of a reward signal, what might we hope that an agent can efficiently learn to do? This work studies a broad class of objectives that are defined solely as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-29 Elad Hazan , Sham M. Kakade , Karan Singh , Abby Van Soest

Single-task RL agents are typically trained under a fixed reward function, which limits their robustness to reward misspecification and their ability to adapt to changing preferences. We introduce Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan , Pieter Abbeel

Mastering multiple tasks through exploration and learning in an environment poses a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Unsupervised RL has been introduced to address this challenge by training policies with intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Junkai Zhang , Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

Intrinsic motivation and reward shaping guide reinforcement learning (RL) agents by adding pseudo-rewards, which can lead to useful emergent behaviors. However, they can also encourage counterproductive exploits, e.g., fixation with noisy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Aly Lidayan , Michael Dennis , Stuart Russell

One of the key approaches to save samples in reinforcement learning (RL) is to use knowledge from an approximate model such as its simulator. However, how much does an approximate model help to learn a near-optimal policy of the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 Fei Feng , Wotao Yin , Lin F. Yang

Exploration remains a key challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). Optimism in the face of uncertainty is a well-known heuristic with theoretical guarantees in the tabular setting, but how best to translate the principle to deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Brendan O'Donoghue