English
Related papers

Related papers: Adjacency constraint for efficient hierarchical re…

200 papers

Reinforcement learning (RL) is currently one of the most prominent methods for optimizing dynamical systems, with breakthrough results across various fields. The framework is based on the concept of a Markov decision process (MDP), leading…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-17 Rene Carmona , Mathieu Lauriere

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) has seen widespread interest as an approach to tractable learning of complex modular behaviors. However, existing work either assume access to expert-constructed hierarchies, or use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Kurtland Chua , Qi Lei , Jason D. Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework to optimize a control policy using rewards that are revealed by the system as a response to a control action. In its standard form, RL involves a single agent that uses its policy to accomplish a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-11-24 Juan Cervino , Juan Andres Bazerque , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro

A Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a popular model for reinforcement learning. However, its commonly used assumption of stationary dynamics and rewards is too stringent and fails to hold in adversarial, nonstationary, or multi-agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-22 Tiancheng Yu , Suvrit Sra

Reinforcement learning in real-world systems often involves delayed feedback, which breaks the Markov assumption and impedes both learning and control. Canonical augmentation-based approaches cause state-space explosion, which imposes a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Jongsoo Lee , Jangwon Kim , Soohee Han

The infinite horizon setting is widely adopted for problems of reinforcement learning (RL). These invariably result in stationary policies that are optimal. In many situations, finite horizon control problems are of interest and for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Soumyajit Guin , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Contrastive Reinforcement Learning (CRL) provides a promising framework for extracting useful structured representations from unlabeled interactions. By pulling together state-action pairs and their corresponding future states, while…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Arsh Tangri , Nichols Crawford Taylor , Haojie Huang , Robert Platt

Hierarchical reinforcement learning is a promising approach to tackle long-horizon decision-making problems with sparse rewards. Unfortunately, most methods still decouple the lower-level skill acquisition process and the training of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-15 Alexander C. Li , Carlos Florensa , Ignasi Clavera , Pieter Abbeel

We present a hybrid ML-heuristic approach that we name "Heuristically Assisted Deep Reinforcement Learning (HA-DRL)" to solve the problem of Network Slice Placement Optimization. The proposed approach leverages recent works on Deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-04 Jose Jurandir Alves Esteves , Amina Boubendir , Fabrice Guillemin , Pierre Sens

We propose a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for control with continuous state and action spaces. In our framework, the user specifies subgoal regions which are subsets of states; then, we (i) learn options that serve as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Kishor Jothimurugan , Osbert Bastani , Rajeev Alur

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) has held longstanding promise to advance reinforcement learning. Yet, it has remained a considerable challenge to develop practical algorithms that exhibit some of these promises. To improve our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Joery A. de Vries , Thomas M. Moerland , Aske Plaat

Goal-conditioned policies are used in order to break down complex reinforcement learning (RL) problems by using subgoals, which can be defined either in state space or in a latent feature space. This can increase the efficiency of learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-04 Srinivas Venkattaramanujam , Eric Crawford , Thang Doan , Doina Precup

Goal representation affects the performance of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) algorithms by decomposing the complex learning problem into easier subtasks. Recent studies show that representations that preserve temporally abstract…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Mehdi Zadem , Sergio Mover , Sao Mai Nguyen

Goal-conditioned hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) decomposes complex reaching tasks into a sequence of simple subgoal-conditioned tasks, showing significant promise for addressing long-horizon planning in large-scale environments.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Haoran Wang , Yaoru Sun , Zeshen Tang , Haibo Shi , Chenyuan Jiao

This paper bridges some of the gap between optimal planning and reinforcement learning (RL), both of which share roots in dynamic programming applied to sequential decision making or optimal control. Whereas planning typically favors…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Filip V. Georgiev , Kalle G. Timperi , Başak Sakçak , Steven M. LaValle

Developing an automated driving system capable of navigating complex traffic environments remains a formidable challenge. Unlike rule-based or supervised learning-based methods, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based controllers eliminate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Zhihao Zhang , Ekim Yurtsever , Keith A. Redmill

In constrained reinforcement learning (C-RL), an agent seeks to learn from the environment a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying minimum requirements in secondary cumulative reward constraints. Several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Tianqi Zheng , Pengcheng You , Enrique Mallada

There have been many recent advances on provably efficient Reinforcement Learning (RL) in problems with rich observation spaces. However, all these works share a strong realizability assumption about the optimal value function of the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Christoph Dann , Yishay Mansour , Mehryar Mohri , Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan

Although well-established in general reinforcement learning (RL), value-based methods are rarely explored in constrained RL (CRL) for their incapability of finding policies that can randomize among multiple actions. To apply value-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Tianchi Cai , Wenpeng Zhang , Lihong Gu , Xiaodong Zeng , Jinjie Gu

Actor-critic deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have recently achieved prominent success in tackling various challenging reinforcement learning (RL) problems, particularly complex control tasks with high-dimensional continuous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-04 Gang Chen , Victoria Huang