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Real-world autonomous decision-making systems, from robots to recommendation engines, must operate in environments that change over time. While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown an impressive ability to learn optimal policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Jonathan Clifford Balloch

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) has acquired a prominent position in health-related sequential decision-making problems, gaining traction as a valuable tool for delivering adaptive interventions (AIs). However, in part due to a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-16 Nina Deliu , Joseph Jay Williams , Bibhas Chakraborty

We introduce a method to address goal misgeneralization in reinforcement learning (RL), leveraging Large Language Model (LLM) feedback during training. Goal misgeneralization, a type of robustness failure in RL occurs when an agent retains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Houda Nait El Barj , Theophile Sautory

Scaling issues are mundane yet irritating for practitioners of reinforcement learning. Error scales vary across domains, tasks, and stages of learning; sometimes by many orders of magnitude. This can be detrimental to learning speed and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-13 Tom Schaul , Georg Ostrovski , Iurii Kemaev , Diana Borsa

As humans, our goals and our environment are persistently changing throughout our lifetime based on our experiences, actions, and internal and external drives. In contrast, typical reinforcement learning problem set-ups consider decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Annie Xie , James Harrison , Chelsea Finn

Recently, various auxiliary tasks have been proposed to accelerate representation learning and improve sample efficiency in deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, existing auxiliary tasks do not take the characteristics of RL problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-23 Guoqing Liu , Chuheng Zhang , Li Zhao , Tao Qin , Jinhua Zhu , Jian Li , Nenghai Yu , Tie-Yan Liu

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to infer an agent's preferences (represented as a reward function $R$) from their behaviour (represented as a policy $\pi$). To do this, we need a behavioural model of how $\pi$ relates to $R$. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Joar Skalse , Alessandro Abate

For AI systems to be useful to humans, they must understand and act in accordance with our values and preferences. Since specifying preferences is a hard task, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to develop methods that allow for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Karim Abdel Sadek , Mark Bedaywi , Rhys Gould , Stuart Russell

We focus on the task of approximating the optimal value function in deep reinforcement learning. This iterative process is comprised of solving a sequence of optimization problems where the loss function changes per iteration. The common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Kavosh Asadi , Rasool Fakoor , Shoham Sabach

The combination of Reinforcement Learning (RL) with deep learning has led to a series of impressive feats, with many believing (deep) RL provides a path towards generally capable agents. However, the success of RL agents is often highly…

Reinforcement learning (RL) enhanced large language models (LLMs), particularly exemplified by DeepSeek-R1, have exhibited outstanding performance. Despite the effectiveness in improving LLM capabilities, its implementation remains highly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Shuhe Wang , Shengyu Zhang , Jie Zhang , Runyi Hu , Xiaoya Li , Tianwei Zhang , Jiwei Li , Fei Wu , Guoyin Wang , Eduard Hovy

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has gained widespread adoption in recent years but faces significant challenges, particularly in unknown and complex environments. Among these, high-dimensional action selection stands out as a critical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-08 Wenbo Zhang , Hengrui Cai

Bayesian Reinforcement Learning (RL) is capable of not only incorporating domain knowledge, but also solving the exploration-exploitation dilemma in a natural way. As Bayesian RL is intractable except for special cases, previous work has…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-06-14 Kenji Kawaguchi , Mauricio Araya

Deep neural networks provide Reinforcement Learning (RL) powerful function approximators to address large-scale decision-making problems. However, these approximators introduce challenges due to the non-stationary nature of RL training. One…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Hongyao Tang , Glen Berseth

In image-based reinforcement learning (RL), policies usually operate in two steps: first extracting lower-dimensional features from raw images (the "recognition" step), and then taking actions based on the extracted features (the "decision"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Alihan Hüyük , Arndt Ryo Koblitz , Atefeh Mohajeri , Matthew Andrews

Reinforcement Learning (RL) enables an intelligent agent to optimise its performance in a task by continuously taking action from an observed state and receiving a feedback from the environment in form of rewards. RL typically uses tables…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Alberto Castagna

Research in machine learning is making progress in fixing its own reproducibility crisis. Reinforcement learning (RL), in particular, faces its own set of unique challenges. Comparison of point estimates, and plots that show successful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Ted Fujimoto , Joshua Suetterlein , Samrat Chatterjee , Auroop Ganguly

The reinforcement learning community has made great strides in designing algorithms capable of exceeding human performance on specific tasks. These algorithms are mostly trained one task at the time, each new task requiring to train a brand…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-13 Matteo Hessel , Hubert Soyer , Lasse Espeholt , Wojciech Czarnecki , Simon Schmitt , Hado van Hasselt

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents are trained through trial-and-error interactions with the environment. This leads to a long training time for dense neural networks to achieve good performance. Hence, prohibitive computation and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-09 Ghada Sokar , Elena Mocanu , Decebal Constantin Mocanu , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Peter Stone

While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has fueled multiple high-profile successes in machine learning, it is held back from more widespread adoption by its often poor data efficiency and the limited generality of the policies it produces. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Jacob Beck , Risto Vuorio , Evan Zheran Liu , Zheng Xiong , Luisa Zintgraf , Chelsea Finn , Shimon Whiteson