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In real-world reinforcement learning (RL) systems, various forms of {\it impaired observability} can complicate matters. These situations arise when an agent is unable to observe the most recent state of the system due to latency or lossy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Minshuo Chen , Jie Meng , Yu Bai , Yinyu Ye , H. Vincent Poor , Mengdi Wang

Continuous-time reinforcement learning (CTRL) provides a natural framework for sequential decision-making in dynamic environments where interactions evolve continuously over time. While CTRL has shown growing empirical success, its ability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Runze Zhao , Yue Yu , Ruhan Wang , Chunfeng Huang , Dongruo Zhou

We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Nadav Merlis

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a branch of machine learning which is employed to solve various sequential decision making problems without proper supervision. Due to the recent advancement of deep learning, the newly proposed Deep-RL…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-04-17 Dhruv Ramani

In offline reinforcement learning (RL), we seek to utilize offline data to evaluate (or learn) policies in scenarios where the data are collected from a distribution that substantially differs from that of the target policy to be evaluated.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Ruosong Wang , Yifan Wu , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Sham M. Kakade

Motion planning under uncertainty is one of the main challenges in developing autonomous driving vehicles. In this work, we focus on the uncertainty in sensing and perception, resulted from a limited field of view, occlusions, and sensing…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-10-05 Kasra Rezaee , Peyman Yadmellat , Simon Chamorro

This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning (RL) framework based on forward-invariance-induced action-space design. The control problem is cast as a Markov decision process, but instead of relying on runtime shielding or penalty-based…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-10 Chieh Tsai , Muhammad Junayed Hasan Zahed , Salim Hariri , Hossein Rastgoftar

Safety is critical when applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. As a result, safe RL has emerged as a fundamental and powerful paradigm for optimizing an agent's policy while incorporating notions of safety. A prevalent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Akifumi Wachi , Xun Shen , Yanan Sui

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated a huge potential in learning optimal policies without any prior knowledge of the process to be controlled. Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a popular control technique which is able to deal with…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-04-10 Mario Zanon , Sébastien Gros , Alberto Bemporad

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a powerful method for controlling dynamic systems, but its learning mechanism can lead to unpredictable actions that undermine the safety of critical systems. Here, we propose RL with Adaptive Regularization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Haozhe Tian , Homayoun Hamedmoghadam , Robert Shorten , Pietro Ferraro

Research in machine learning is making progress in fixing its own reproducibility crisis. Reinforcement learning (RL), in particular, faces its own set of unique challenges. Comparison of point estimates, and plots that show successful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Ted Fujimoto , Joshua Suetterlein , Samrat Chatterjee , Auroop Ganguly

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved tremendous development in recent years, but still faces significant obstacles in addressing complex real-life problems due to the issues of poor system generalization, low sample efficiency as well…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Chao Yu , Shicheng Ye , Hankz Hankui Zhuo

Chaotic dynamical systems pose a fundamental challenge for Reinforcement Learning (RL): exponential sensitivity to initial conditions induces high-variance bootstrap targets and poorly conditioned gradient updates. Chaotic dynamics arise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 James Rudd-Jones , Mirco Musolesi , María Pérez-Ortiz

We consider the problem of Reinforcement Learning for nonlinear stochastic dynamical systems. We show that in the RL setting, there is an inherent ``Curse of Variance" in addition to Bellman's infamous ``Curse of Dimensionality", in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Raman Goyal , Suman Chakravorty , Ran Wang , Mohamed Naveed Gul Mohamed

Deep reinforcement learning agents achieve state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of simulated control tasks. However, successful applications to real-world problems remain limited. One reason for this dichotomy is because the learnt…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-27 Rory Young , Nicolas Pugeault

This article is a gentle discussion about the field of reinforcement learning in practice, about opportunities and challenges, touching a broad range of topics, with perspectives and without technical details. The article is based on both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Yuxi Li

Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms exhibit broad generality in their theoretical formulation and high performance on several challenging domains when combined with powerful function approximation. However, developing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Joseph Modayil , Zaheer Abbas

Reinforcement learning~(RL) is a versatile framework for learning to solve complex real-world tasks. However, influences on the learning performance of RL algorithms are often poorly understood in practice. We discuss different analysis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Jan Schneider , Pierre Schumacher , Daniel Häufle , Bernhard Schölkopf , Dieter Büchler

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms that learn policies by trial-and-error must learn from limited amounts of data collected by actively interacting with the environment. While many prior works have shown that proper regularization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-21 Qiyang Li , Aviral Kumar , Ilya Kostrikov , Sergey Levine

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang