English
Related papers

Related papers: Branching Reinforcement Learning

200 papers

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Philippe Morere , Gilad Francis , Tom Blau , Fabio Ramos

A promising way to improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning is model-based methods, in which many explorations and evaluations can happen in the learned models to save real-world samples. However, when the learned model has a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-14 Haoxin Lin , Yihao Sun , Jiaji Zhang , Yang Yu

In many real-world settings, reinforcement learning systems suffer performance degradation when the environment encountered at deployment differs from that observed during training. Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DR-RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Debamita Ghosh , George K. Atia , Yue Wang

In this paper, we investigate preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), which enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn from human feedback. This is particularly valuable when defining a fine-grain reward function is not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Guojian Wang , Jianxiang Liu , Xinyuan Li , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Tianyuan Chen , Xuyang Chen

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a general framework for adaptive control, which has proven to be efficient in many domains, e.g., board games, video games or autonomous vehicles. In such problems, an agent faces a sequential decision-making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Olivier Buffet , Olivier Pietquin , Paul Weng

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for a class of continuous-time linear-quadratic (LQ) control problems for diffusions, where states are scalar-valued and running control rewards are absent but volatilities of the state processes depend…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Yilie Huang , Yanwei Jia , Xun Yu Zhou

The framework of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) provides a powerful and widely applicable mathematical formalization for sequential decision-making. This paper present a novel DRL framework, termed \emph{$f$-Divergence Reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-15 Chen Gong , Qiang He , Yunpeng Bai , Zhou Yang , Xiaoyu Chen , Xinwen Hou , Xianjie Zhang , Yu Liu , Guoliang Fan

Value function approximation is important in modern reinforcement learning (RL) problems especially when the state space is (infinitely) large. Despite the importance and wide applicability of value function approximation, its theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-24 Hanlin Zhu , Ruosong Wang , Jason D. Lee

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an important machine learning paradigm for solving sequential decision-making problems. Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in this field due to the rapid development of deep neural networks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Chaofan Pan , Xin Yang , Yanhua Li , Wei Wei , Tianrui Li , Bo An , Jiye Liang

We introduce Random Latent Exploration (RLE), a simple yet effective exploration strategy in reinforcement learning (RL). On average, RLE outperforms noise-based methods, which perturb the agent's actions, and bonus-based exploration, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Srinath Mahankali , Zhang-Wei Hong , Ayush Sekhari , Alexander Rakhlin , Pulkit Agrawal

Diffusion models excel at modeling complex data distributions, including those of images, proteins, and small molecules. However, in many cases, our goal is to model parts of the distribution that maximize certain properties: for example,…

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

In reinforcement learning, experience replay stores past samples for further reuse. Prioritized sampling is a promising technique to better utilize these samples. Previous criteria of prioritization include TD error, recentness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Xu-Hui Liu , Zhenghai Xue , Jing-Cheng Pang , Shengyi Jiang , Feng Xu , Yang Yu

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate strong performance in complex tasks but often face the challenge of overthinking, leading to substantially high inference costs. Existing approaches synthesize shorter reasoning responses for LRMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Hexuan Deng , Wenxiang Jiao , Xuebo Liu , Jun Rao , Min Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is typically concerned with estimating stationary policies or single-step models, leveraging the Markov property to factorize problems in time. However, we can also view RL as a generic sequence modeling problem,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Michael Janner , Qiyang Li , Sergey Levine

The goal of reinforcement learning (RL) is to let an agent learn an optimal control policy in an unknown environment so that future expected rewards are maximized. The model-free RL approach directly learns the policy based on data samples.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-07-22 Syogo Mori , Voot Tangkaratt , Tingting Zhao , Jun Morimoto , Masashi Sugiyama

This paper focuses on reinforcement learning (RL) with limited prior knowledge. In the domain of swarm robotics for instance, the expert can hardly design a reward function or demonstrate the target behavior, forbidding the use of both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-08-07 Riad Akrour , Marc Schoenauer , Michèle Sebag

We propose a new algorithm for model-based distributional reinforcement learning (RL), and prove that it is minimax-optimal for approximating return distributions with a generative model (up to logarithmic factors), resolving an open…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Mark Rowland , Li Kevin Wenliang , Rémi Munos , Clare Lyle , Yunhao Tang , Will Dabney

We study risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) based on the entropic risk measure. Although existing works have established non-asymptotic regret guarantees for this problem, they leave open an exponential gap between the upper and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-09 Yingjie Fei , Zhuoran Yang , Yudong Chen , Zhaoran Wang

In the realm of reinforcement learning (RL), accounting for risk is crucial for making decisions under uncertainty, particularly in applications where safety and reliability are paramount. In this paper, we introduce a general framework on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-29 Yu Chen , Xiangcheng Zhang , Siwei Wang , Longbo Huang