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The success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the ability to learn robust representations from the observations of the environment. In most cases, the representations learned purely by the reinforcement learning loss can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Somjit Nath , Rushiv Arora , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the active fields in machine learning, demonstrating remarkable potential in tackling real-world challenges. Despite its promising prospects, this methodology has encountered with issues and challenges,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Alireza Rashidi Laleh , Majid Nili Ahmadabadi

Reinforcement learning (RL) training is inherently unstable due to factors such as moving targets and high gradient variance. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Ju-Seung Byun , Andrew Perrault

Vision-based robotics often separates the control loop into one module for perception and a separate module for control. It is possible to train the whole system end-to-end (e.g. with deep RL), but doing it "from scratch" comes with a high…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-16 Bryan Chen , Alexander Sax , Gene Lewis , Iro Armeni , Silvio Savarese , Amir Zamir , Jitendra Malik , Lerrel Pinto

Rather than proposing a new method, this paper investigates an issue present in existing learning algorithms. We study the learning dynamics of reinforcement learning (RL), specifically a characteristic coupling between learning and data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-26 Tom Schaul , Diana Borsa , Joseph Modayil , Razvan Pascanu

This paper investigates the instability of Q-learning in continuous environments, a challenge frequently encountered by practitioners. Traditionally, this instability is attributed to bootstrapping and regression model errors. Using a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Philipp Wissmann , Daniel Hein , Steffen Udluft , Thomas Runkler

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) is empirically shown to notably enhance the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), particularly in mathematics and programming. However, the mechanistic role of Sample…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yue Cheng , Jiajun Zhang , Xiaohui Gao , Weiwei Xing , Zheng Wang , Zhanxing Zhu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in real-world decision-making across diverse domains, including gaming, robotics, online advertising, public health, and natural language processing. Despite these advances, a…

Applications · Statistics 2026-01-23 Asim H. Gazi , Yongyi Guo , Daiqi Gao , Ziping Xu , Kelly W. Zhang , Susan A. Murphy

Despite the numerous advances, reinforcement learning remains away from widespread acceptance for autonomous controller design as compared to classical methods due to lack of ability to effectively tackle the reality gap. The reliance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Narendra Patwardhan , Zequn Wang

The sample inefficiency of reinforcement learning (RL) remains a significant challenge in robotics. RL requires large-scale simulation and can still cause long training times, slowing research and innovation. This issue is particularly…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Johannes Heeg , Yunlong Song , Davide Scaramuzza

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

Training robots to perform complex control tasks from high-dimensional pixel input using reinforcement learning (RL) is sample-inefficient, because image observations are comprised primarily of task-irrelevant information. By contrast,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Anthony Liang , Jesse Thomason , Erdem Bıyık

Modern reinforcement learning (RL) systems capture deep truths about general, human problem-solving. In domains where new data can be simulated cheaply, these systems uncover sequential decision-making policies that far exceed the ability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Scott Jeen

A significant obstacle in the development of robust machine learning models is covariate shift, a form of distribution shift that occurs when the input distributions of the training and test sets differ while the conditional label…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-17 Nilesh Tripuraneni , Ben Adlam , Jeffrey Pennington

A major challenge of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world applications is the variation between environments, tasks or clients. Meta-RL (MRL) addresses this issue by learning a meta-policy that adapts to new tasks. Standard MRL methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Ido Greenberg , Shie Mannor , Gal Chechik , Eli Meirom

Recent advances in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to large language models (LLMs) have led to substantial progress. In particular, a series of remarkable yet often counterintuitive phenomena have been reported in LLMs, exhibiting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Haoze Wu , Cheng Wang , Wenshuo Zhao , Junxian He

We investigate the important problem of certifying stability of reinforcement learning policies when interconnected with nonlinear dynamical systems. We show that by regulating the input-output gradients of policies, strong guarantees of…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Ming Jin , Javad Lavaei

Reinforcement learning (RL) has had its fair share of success in contact-rich manipulation tasks but it still lags behind in benefiting from advances in robot control theory such as impedance control and stability guarantees. Recently, the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-09-29 Shahbaz A. Khader , Hang Yin , Pietro Falco , Danica Kragic

Providing a suitable reward function to reinforcement learning can be difficult in many real world applications. While inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) holds promise for automatically learning reward functions from demonstrations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Lantao Yu , Tianhe Yu , Chelsea Finn , Stefano Ermon

Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown impressive results in games and simulation, real-world application of RL suffers from its instability under changing environment conditions and hyperparameters. We give a first impression of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-22 Theresa Eimer , Carolin Benjamins , Marius Lindauer