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Reinforcement learning defines the problem facing agents that learn to make good decisions through action and observation alone. To be effective problem solvers, such agents must efficiently explore vast worlds, assign credit from delayed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-02 David Abel

While deep reinforcement learning methods have shown impressive results in robot learning, their sample inefficiency makes the learning of complex, long-horizon behaviors with real robot systems infeasible. To mitigate this issue,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Taewook Nam , Shao-Hua Sun , Karl Pertsch , Sung Ju Hwang , Joseph J Lim

The main focus of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is studying how large Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) can be more efficiently solved when addressed in a modular way, by combining partial solutions computed for smaller subtasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Roberto Cipollone , Luca Iocchi , Matteo Leonetti

Reinforcement learning is a general technique that allows an agent to learn an optimal policy and interact with an environment in sequential decision making problems. The goodness of a policy is measured by its value function starting from…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-30 C. Shi , S. Zhang , W. Lu , R. Song

We present relay policy learning, a method for imitation and reinforcement learning that can solve multi-stage, long-horizon robotic tasks. This general and universally-applicable, two-phase approach consists of an imitation learning stage…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Abhishek Gupta , Vikash Kumar , Corey Lynch , Sergey Levine , Karol Hausman

Large language models excel at short-horizon reasoning tasks, but performance drops as reasoning horizon lengths increase. Existing approaches to combat this rely on inference-time scaffolding or costly step-level supervision, neither of…

Existing off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms often rely on an explicit state-action-value function representation, which can be problematic in high-dimensional action spaces due to the curse of dimensionality. This reliance results…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Fabian Otto , Philipp Becker , Ngo Anh Vien , Gerhard Neumann

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms can suffer from poor sample efficiency when rewards are delayed and sparse. We introduce a solution that enables agents to learn temporally extended actions at multiple levels of abstraction in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-11 Andrew Levy , Robert Platt , Kate Saenko

Enabling reinforcement learning (RL) agents to leverage a knowledge base while learning from experience promises to advance RL in knowledge intensive domains. However, it has proven difficult to leverage knowledge that is not manually…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Niklas Höpner , Ilaria Tiddi , Herke van Hoof

Most model-free reinforcement learning methods leverage state representations (embeddings) for generalization, but either ignore structure in the space of actions or assume the structure is provided a priori. We show how a policy can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-16 Yash Chandak , Georgios Theocharous , James Kostas , Scott Jordan , Philip S. Thomas

Open-ended learning benefits immensely from the use of symbolic methods for goal representation as they offer ways to structure knowledge for efficient and transferable learning. However, the existing Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-20 Mehdi Zadem , Sergio Mover , Sao Mai Nguyen

Reinforcement learning is still struggling with solving long-horizon surgical robot tasks which involve multiple steps over an extended duration of time due to the policy exploration challenge. Recent methods try to tackle this problem by…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Tao Huang , Kai Chen , Wang Wei , Jianan Li , Yonghao Long , Qi Dou

While the difficulty of reinforcement learning problems is typically related to the complexity of their state spaces, Abstraction proposes that solutions often lie in simpler underlying latent spaces. Prior works have focused on learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Amnon Attali , Pedro Cisneros-Velarde , Marco Morales , Nancy M. Amato

Deep reinforcement learning has shown promise in discrete domains requiring complex reasoning, including games such as Chess, Go, and Hanabi. However, this type of reasoning is less often observed in long-horizon, continuous domains with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Andrew C. Li , Pashootan Vaezipoor , Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Sheila A. McIlraith

Offline multi-task reinforcement learning aims to learn a unified policy capable of solving multiple tasks using only pre-collected task-mixed datasets, without requiring any online interaction with the environment. However, it faces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Jinmin He , Kai Li , Yifan Zang , Haobo Fu , Qiang Fu , Junliang Xing , Jian Cheng

Methods of deep machine learning enable to to reuse low-level representations efficiently for generating more abstract high-level representations. Originally, deep learning has been applied passively (e.g., for classification purposes).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-12-22 Mark Wernsdorfer , Ute Schmid

In the face of difficult exploration problems in reinforcement learning, we study whether giving an agent an object-centric mapping (describing a set of items and their attributes) allow for more efficient learning. We found this problem is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Anthony GX-Chen , Kenneth Marino , Rob Fergus

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is a promising approach to solving long-horizon problems with sparse and delayed rewards. Many existing HRL algorithms either use pre-trained low-level skills that are unadaptable, or require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-11 Siyuan Li , Rui Wang , Minxue Tang , Chongjie Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for learning to take actions to solve tasks. However, in many settings, an agent must winnow down the inconceivably large space of all possible tasks to the single task that it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Lisa Lee , Benjamin Eysenbach , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Shixiang Shane Gu , Chelsea Finn

In the quest for efficient and robust reinforcement learning methods, both model-free and model-based approaches offer advantages. In this paper we propose a new way of explicitly bridging both approaches via a shared low-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Vincent François-Lavet , Yoshua Bengio , Doina Precup , Joelle Pineau