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Robust policies enable reinforcement learning agents to effectively adapt to and operate in unpredictable, dynamic, and ever-changing real-world environments. Factored representations, which break down complex state and action spaces into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-20 Panayiotis Panayiotou , Özgür Şimşek

We consider a problem of learning the reward and policy from expert examples under unknown dynamics. Our proposed method builds on the framework of generative adversarial networks and introduces the empowerment-regularized maximum-entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Ahmed H. Qureshi , Byron Boots , Michael C. Yip

This paper considers the problem of adapting a predesigned policy, represented by a parameterized function class, from a solution that minimizes a given original cost function to a trade-off solution between minimizing the original…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-06 Wenjian Hao , Zehui Lu , Nicolas Miguel , Shaoshuai Mou

Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Shuze Daniel Liu , Claire Chen , Shangtong Zhang

We consider an agent interacting with an environment in a single stream of actions, observations, and rewards, with no reset. This process is not assumed to be a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Rather, the agent has several representations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-03-19 Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Phuong Nguyen , Ronald Ortner , Daniil Ryabko

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents continually interact with the environment and use the feedback to refine their behavior. To guide policy optimization, reward models are introduced as proxies of the desired objectives, such that when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Rui Yu , Shenghua Wan , Yucen Wang , Chen-Xiao Gao , Le Gan , Zongzhang Zhang , De-Chuan Zhan

Reinforcement learning has traditionally been studied with exponential discounting or the average reward setup, mainly due to their mathematical tractability. However, such frameworks fall short of accurately capturing human behavior, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-18 S. R. Eshwar , Mayank Motwani , Nibedita Roy , Gugan Thoppe

Due to information asymmetry, finding optimal policies for Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (Dec-POMDPs) is hard with the complexity growing doubly exponentially in the horizon length. The challenge increases…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Hsu Kao , Vijay Subramanian

Option discovery and skill acquisition frameworks are integral to the functioning of a Hierarchically organized Reinforcement learning agent. However, such techniques often yield a large number of options or skills, which can potentially be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-06 Arjun Manoharan , Rahul Ramesh , Balaraman Ravindran

Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) generally suffers from poor sample complexity, mostly due to the need to exhaustively explore the state-action space to find well-performing policies. On the other hand, we postulate that expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Loris Di Natale , Bratislav Svetozarevic , Philipp Heer , Colin N. Jones

Entropy regularization is commonly used to improve policy optimization in reinforcement learning. It is believed to help with \emph{exploration} by encouraging the selection of more stochastic policies. In this work, we analyze this claim…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Zafarali Ahmed , Nicolas Le Roux , Mohammad Norouzi , Dale Schuurmans

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

A reinforcement learning agent tries to maximize its cumulative payoff by interacting in an unknown environment. It is important for the agent to explore suboptimal actions as well as to pick actions with highest known rewards. Yet, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-23 Reazul Hasan Russel

In reward-free reinforcement learning (RL), an agent explores the environment first without any reward information, in order to achieve certain learning goals afterwards for any given reward. In this paper we focus on reward-free RL under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Yuan Cheng , Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

We investigate sparse representations for control in reinforcement learning. While these representations are widely used in computer vision, their prevalence in reinforcement learning is limited to sparse coding where extracting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-19 Vincent Liu , Raksha Kumaraswamy , Lei Le , Martha White

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated tremendous empirical success across numerous challenging domains. However, we lack a strong theoretical understanding of the statistical complexity of RL in environments with large state spaces,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Gene Li

We consider a Reinforcement Learning setup where an agent interacts with an environment in observation-reward-action cycles without any (esp.\ MDP) assumptions on the environment. State aggregation and more generally feature reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-07-15 Marcus Hutter

We study a security threat to reinforcement learning where an attacker poisons the learning environment to force the agent into executing a target policy chosen by the attacker. As a victim, we consider RL agents whose objective is to find…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Amin Rakhsha , Goran Radanovic , Rati Devidze , Xiaojin Zhu , Adish Singla

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Minjae Cho , Huy Trong Tran

Leveraging machine learning methods to solve constraint satisfaction problems has shown promising, but they are mostly limited to a static situation where the problem description is completely known and fixed from the beginning. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Wook Lee , Frans A. Oliehoek