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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

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a variant of RL where the policy is learned from a previously collected dataset of trajectories and rewards. In our work, we propose a practical approach to offline RL with large language models…

Offline reinforcement learning requires reconciling two conflicting aims: learning a policy that improves over the behavior policy that collected the dataset, while at the same time minimizing the deviation from the behavior policy so as to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-13 Ilya Kostrikov , Ashvin Nair , Sergey Levine

Most reinforcement learning (RL) methods only focus on learning a single task from scratch and are not able to use prior knowledge to learn other tasks more effectively. Context-based meta RL techniques are recently proposed as a possible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Xu Han , Feng Wu

Providing a suitable reward function to reinforcement learning can be difficult in many real world applications. While inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) holds promise for automatically learning reward functions from demonstrations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Lantao Yu , Tianhe Yu , Chelsea Finn , Stefano Ermon

Imitation learning is an effective alternative approach to learn a policy when the reward function is sparse. In this paper, we consider a challenging setting where an agent and an expert use different actions from each other. We assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Konrad Zolna , Negar Rostamzadeh , Yoshua Bengio , Sungjin Ahn , Pedro O. Pinheiro

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn an optimal policy from pre-collected data. However, it faces challenges of distributional shift, where the learned policy may encounter unseen scenarios not covered in the offline data.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Jin Zhu , Xin Zhou , Jiaang Yao , Gholamali Aminian , Omar Rivasplata , Simon Little , Lexin Li , Chengchun Shi

This work presents a case study of a learning-based approach for target driven map-less navigation. The underlying navigation model is an end-to-end neural network which is trained using a combination of expert demonstrations, imitation…

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is commonly used in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback to align large language models (LLMs) with downstream tasks. This paper investigates the feasibility of using PPO for direct reinforcement…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Alexander G. Padula , Dennis J. N. J. Soemers

A significant challenge for the practical application of reinforcement learning in the real world is the need to specify an oracle reward function that correctly defines a task. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to avoid this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-16 Kelvin Xu , Ellis Ratner , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

Imitation learning (IL) is a simple and powerful way to use high-quality human driving data, which can be collected at scale, to produce human-like behavior. However, policies based on imitation learning alone often fail to sufficiently…

Imitation learning (IL) is a popular paradigm for training policies in robotic systems when specifying the reward function is difficult. However, despite the success of IL algorithms, they impose the somewhat unrealistic requirement that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-16 Luca Viano , Yu-Ting Huang , Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Craig Innes , Subramanian Ramamoorthy , Adrian Weller

Replication of experimental results has been a challenge faced by many scientific disciplines, including the field of machine learning. Recent work on the theory of machine learning has formalized replicability as the demand that an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Eric Eaton , Marcel Hussing , Michael Kearns , Aaron Roth , Sikata Bela Sengupta , Jessica Sorrell

Self-imitation learning is a Reinforcement Learning (RL) method that encourages actions whose returns were higher than expected, which helps in hard exploration and sparse reward problems. It was shown to improve the performance of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-23 Johan Ferret , Olivier Pietquin , Matthieu Geist

In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Grigorii Veviurko , Wendelin Böhmer , Mathijs de Weerdt

Offline reinforcement learning can enable policy learning from pre-collected, sub-optimal datasets without online interactions. This makes it ideal for real-world robots and safety-critical scenarios, where collecting online data or expert…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Sreyas Venkataraman , Yufei Wang , Ziyu Wang , Navin Sriram Ravie , Zackory Erickson , David Held

Recommender systems (RecSys) have become critical tools for enhancing user engagement by delivering personalized content across diverse digital platforms. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) demonstrate significant potential…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Yi Zhang , Lili Xie , Ruihong Qiu , Jiajun Liu , Sen Wang

Techniques that learn improved representations via offline data or self-supervised objectives have shown impressive results in traditional reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, it is unclear how improved representation learning can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Vaskar Nath , Dylan Slack , Jeff Da , Yuntao Ma , Hugh Zhang , Spencer Whitehead , Sean Hendryx

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

Imitation learning (IL) is a framework that learns to imitate expert behavior from demonstrations. Recently, IL shows promising results on high dimensional and control tasks. However, IL typically suffers from sample inefficiency in terms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-24 Lihua Zhang