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Safe reinforcement learning (RL) trains a policy to maximize the task reward while satisfying safety constraints. While prior works focus on the performance optimality, we find that the optimal solutions of many safe RL problems are not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Zuxin Liu , Zijian Guo , Zhepeng Cen , Huan Zhang , Jie Tan , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

Despite the many recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL), the question of learning policies that robustly satisfy state constraints under unknown disturbances remains open. In this paper, we offer a new perspective on achieving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Pierre-François Massiani , Alexander von Rohr , Lukas Haverbeck , Sebastian Trimpe

We find that the performance of state-of-the-art models on Natural Language Inference (NLI) and Reading Comprehension (RC) analysis/stress sets can be highly unstable. This raises three questions: (1) How will the instability affect the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-17 Xiang Zhou , Yixin Nie , Hao Tan , Mohit Bansal

In recent years, a variety of tasks have been accomplished by deep reinforcement learning (DRL). However, when applying DRL to tasks in a real-world environment, designing an appropriate reward is difficult. Rewards obtained via actual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Kanata Suzuki , Tetsuya Ogata

Reinforcement learning (RL) faces substantial challenges when applied to real-life problems, primarily stemming from the scarcity of available data due to limited interactions with the environment. This limitation is exacerbated by the fact…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-04-10 Cristiano Capone , Paolo Muratore

Deep Reinforcement Learning has shown great success in a variety of control tasks. However, it is unclear how close we are to the vision of putting Deep RL into practice to solve real world problems. In particular, common practice in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-21 Chenyang Zhao , Olivier Sigaud , Freek Stulp , Timothy M. Hospedales

Prolonged reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been shown to drive continuous improvements in the reasoning capabilities of large language models, but the training is often prone to instabilities, especially in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yiming Dong , Kun Fu , Haoyu Li , Xinyuan Zhu , Yurou Liu , Lijing Shao , Jieping Ye , Zheng Wang

In finance, sequential decision problems are often faced, for which reinforcement learning (RL) emerges as a promising tool for optimisation without the need of analytical tractability. However, the objective of classical RL is the expected…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2026-02-13 Federico Cacciamani , Roberto Daluiso , Marco Pinciroli , Michele Trapletti , Edoardo Vittori

Recent results in Reinforcement Learning (RL) have shown that agents with limited training environments are susceptible to a large amount of overfitting across many domains. A key challenge for RL generalization is to quantitatively explain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Xingyou Song , Yilun Du , Jacob Jackson

Vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach to solve control tasks involving images as the main observation. State-of-the-art RL algorithms still struggle in terms of sample efficiency, especially when using image…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-05 Elie Aljalbout , Maximilian Ulmer , Rudolph Triebel

Reinforcement Learning (RL) for training Large Language Models is notoriously unstable. While recent studies attribute this to "training inference mismatch stemming" from inconsistent hybrid engines, standard remedies, such as Importance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yaxiang Zhang , Yingru Li , Jiacai Liu , Jiawei Xu , Ziniu Li , Qian Liu , Haoyuan Li

When learning behavior, training data is often generated by the learner itself; this can result in unstable training dynamics, and this problem has particularly important applications in safety-sensitive real-world control tasks such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-10 Vibhavari Dasagi , Jake Bruce , Thierry Peynot , Jürgen Leitner

Trainable activation functions, whose parameters are optimized alongside network weights, offer increased expressivity compared to fixed activation functions. Specifically, trainable activation functions defined as ratios of polynomials…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Rafał Surdej , Michał Bortkiewicz , Alex Lewandowski , Mateusz Ostaszewski , Clare Lyle

Vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising technique to solve control tasks involving images as the main observation. State-of-the-art RL algorithms still struggle in terms of sample efficiency, especially when using image…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-29 Elie Aljalbout , Maximilian Ulmer , Rudolph Triebel

In statistics and machine learning, approximation of an intractable integration is often achieved by using the unbiased Monte Carlo estimator, but the variances of the estimation are generally high in many applications. Control variates…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-16 Ruosi Wan , Mingjun Zhong , Haoyi Xiong , Zhanxing Zhu

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has proven effective in improving Large Language Model's (LLM) reasoning ability. However, the learning dynamics of RLVR remain underexplored. In this paper, we reveal a counterintuitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Yulin Chen , He He , Chen Zhao

Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has had incredible achievements on high dimensional problems, yet its learning process remains unstable even on the simplest tasks. Deep RL uses neural networks as function approximators. These neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Riccardo Della Vecchia , Alena Shilova , Philippe Preux , Riad Akrour

Practical application of Reinforcement Learning (RL) often involves risk considerations. We study a generalized approximation scheme for risk measures, based on Monte-Carlo simulations, where the risk measures need not necessarily be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-23 Dotan Di Castro , Joel Oren , Shie Mannor

Robustness to noise is of utmost importance in reinforcement learning systems, particularly in military contexts where high stakes and uncertain environments prevail. Noise and uncertainty are inherent features of military operations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Lorenzo Nodari , Federico Cerutti

Flexibility design problems are a class of problems that appear in strategic decision-making across industries, where the objective is to design a ($e.g.$, manufacturing) network that affords flexibility and adaptivity. The underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Yehua Wei , Lei Zhang , Ruiyi Zhang , Shijing Si , Hao Zhang , Lawrence Carin