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Strong worst-case performance bounds for episodic reinforcement learning exist but fortunately in practice RL algorithms perform much better than such bounds would predict. Algorithms and theory that provide strong problem-dependent bounds…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Andrea Zanette , Emma Brunskill

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been able to solve hard problems such as playing Atari games or solving the game of Go, with a unified approach. Yet modern deep RL approaches are still not widely used in real-world applications. One reason…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-08 Achraf Azize , Othman Gaizi

We study the problem of episodic reinforcement learning in continuous state-action spaces with unknown rewards and transitions. Specifically, we consider the setting where the rewards and transitions are modeled using parametric bilinear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Reda Ouhamma , Debabrota Basu , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) studies problems where an intelligent agent has to not only maximize reward but also avoid exploring unsafe areas. In this study, we propose CUP, a novel policy optimization method based on Constrained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-10 Long Yang , Jiaming Ji , Juntao Dai , Linrui Zhang , Binbin Zhou , Pengfei Li , Yaodong Yang , Gang Pan

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) faces significant challenges in addressing the hard-exploration problems in tasks with sparse or deceptive rewards and large state spaces. These challenges severely limit the practical application of DRL.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-03 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Ning Guo , Zhiming Zheng

We study the problem of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), where the learning agent recovers a reward function using expert demonstrations. Most of the existing IRL techniques make the often unrealistic assumption that the agent has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-20 Franck Djeumou , Murat Cubuktepe , Craig Lennon , Ufuk Topcu

The goal of robust constrained reinforcement learning (RL) is to optimize an agent's performance under the worst-case model uncertainty while satisfying safety or resource constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate that strong duality does…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Shaocong Ma , Ziyi Chen , Yi Zhou , Heng Huang

In risk-averse reinforcement learning (RL), the goal is to optimize some risk measure of the returns. A risk measure often focuses on the worst returns out of the agent's experience. As a result, standard methods for risk-averse RL often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Ido Greenberg , Yinlam Chow , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Shie Mannor

Empowered by expressive function approximators such as neural networks, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) achieves tremendous empirical successes. However, learning expressive function approximators requires collecting a large dataset…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Lingxiao Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

In this paper, we study reinforcement learning in Markov Decision Processes with Probabilistic Reward Machines (PRMs), a form of non-Markovian reward commonly found in robotics tasks. We design an algorithm for PRMs that achieves a regret…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-21 Xiaofeng Lin , Xuezhou Zhang

Exploration is a crucial and distinctive aspect of reinforcement learning (RL) that remains a fundamental open problem. Several methods have been proposed to tackle this challenge. Commonly used methods inject random noise directly into the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Sebastian Griesbach , Carlo D'Eramo

For many applications of reinforcement learning it can be more convenient to specify both a reward function and constraints, rather than trying to design behavior through the reward function. For example, systems that physically interact…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-31 Joshua Achiam , David Held , Aviv Tamar , Pieter Abbeel

Model-free reinforcement learning methods such as the Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm (PPO) have successfully applied in complex decision-making problems such as Atari games. However, these methods suffer from high variances and high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Feiyang Pan , Qingpeng Cai , An-Xiang Zeng , Chun-Xiang Pan , Qing Da , Hualin He , Qing He , Pingzhong Tang

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) studies how to leverage environment statistics to learn useful behaviors without the cost of reward engineering. However, a central challenge in unsupervised RL is to extract behaviors that…

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for deploying RL agents in real-world applications, as it aims to maximize long-term rewards while satisfying safety constraints. However, safe RL often suffers from sample inefficiency, requiring…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Shangding Gu , Laixi Shi , Yuhao Ding , Alois Knoll , Costas Spanos , Adam Wierman , Ming Jin

Constrained optimization provides a common framework for dealing with conflicting objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). In most of these settings, the objectives (and constraints) are expressed though the expected accumulated reward.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Jane H. Lee , Baturay Saglam , Spyridon Pougkakiotis , Amin Karbasi , Dionysis Kalogerias

Many reinforcement learning exploration techniques are overly optimistic and try to explore every state. Such exploration is impossible in environments with the unlimited number of states. I propose to use simulated exploration with an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2009-05-20 Ivo Danihelka

This work proposes a unified control architecture that couples a Reinforcement Learning (RL)-driven controller with a disturbance-rejection Extended State Observer (ESO), complemented by an Event-Triggered Mechanism (ETM) to limit…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-01 Ningwei Bai , Chi Pui Chan , Qichen Yin , Tengyang Gong , Yunda Yan , Zezhi Tang

Safe exploration remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), limiting the deployment of RL agents in the real world. We propose Sampling-Based Safe Reinforcement Learning (SBSRL), a model-based RL algorithm that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Luca Vignola , Bruce D. Lee , Manish Prajapat , Manuel Wendl , Melanie Zeilinger , Andreas Krause , Yarden As

Engagement-optimized adaptive tutoring systems may prioritize short-term behavioral signals over sustained learning outcomes, creating structural incentives for reward hacking in reinforcement learning policies. We formalize this challenge…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Oluseyi Olukola , Nick Rahimi