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Imitation learning (IL) consists of a set of tools that leverage expert demonstrations to quickly learn policies. However, if the expert is suboptimal, IL can yield policies with inferior performance compared to reinforcement learning (RL).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-29 Ching-An Cheng , Xinyan Yan , Nolan Wagener , Byron Boots

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) infers a reward function from demonstrations, allowing for policy improvement and generalization. However, despite much recent interest in IRL, little work has been done to understand the minimum set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-19 Daniel S. Brown , Scott Niekum

We transform reinforcement learning (RL) into a form of supervised learning (SL) by turning traditional RL on its head, calling this Upside Down RL (UDRL). Standard RL predicts rewards, while UDRL instead uses rewards as task-defining…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Juergen Schmidhuber

Options represent a framework for reasoning across multiple time scales in reinforcement learning (RL). With the recent active interest in the unsupervised learning paradigm in the RL research community, the option framework was adapted to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Djordje Božić , Predrag Tadić , Mladen Nikolić

Reinforcement learning has become the central approach for language models (LMs) to learn from environmental reward or feedback. In practice, the environmental feedback is usually sparse and delayed. Learning from such signals is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Taiwei Shi , Sihao Chen , Bowen Jiang , Linxin Song , Longqi Yang , Jieyu Zhao

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to infer a reward from expert demonstrations, motivated by the idea that the reward, rather than the policy, is the most succinct and transferable description of a task [Ng et al., 2000]. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Maryam Kamgarpour

Reinforcement learning is a promising framework for solving control problems, but its use in practical situations is hampered by the fact that reward functions are often difficult to engineer. Specifying goals and tasks for autonomous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-22 Justin Fu , Anoop Korattikara , Sergey Levine , Sergio Guadarrama

Reinforcement learning (RL) presents a promising framework to learn policies through environment interaction, but often requires an infeasible amount of interaction data to solve complex tasks from sparse rewards. One direction includes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Stone Tao , Arth Shukla , Tse-kai Chan , Hao Su

We study a class of constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which multiple constraint specifications are not identified before training. It is challenging to identify appropriate constraint specifications due to the undefined…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-02 Dongsheng Ding , Zhengyan Huan , Alejandro Ribeiro

Often times in imitation learning (IL), the environment we collect expert demonstrations in and the environment we want to deploy our learned policy in aren't exactly the same (e.g. demonstrations collected in simulation but deployment in…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Silvia Sapora , Gokul Swamy , Chris Lu , Yee Whye Teh , Jakob Nicolaus Foerster

We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Nadav Merlis

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods rely on experience replay to approximate the minibatched supervised learning setting; however, unlike supervised learning where access to lots of training data is crucial to generalization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Brett Daley , Cameron Hickert , Christopher Amato

A promising paradigm for offline reinforcement learning (RL) is to constrain the learned policy to stay close to the dataset behaviors, known as policy constraint offline RL. However, existing works heavily rely on the purity of the data,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Chengqian Gao , Ke Xu , Liu Liu , Deheng Ye , Peilin Zhao , Zhiqiang Xu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training LLM-based agents, yet remains limited by low sample efficiency, stemming not only from sparse outcome feedback but also from the agent's inability to leverage prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Dilxat Muhtar , Jiashun Liu , Wei Gao , Weixun Wang , Shaopan Xiong , Ju Huang , Siran Yang , Wenbo Su , Jiamang Wang , Ling Pan , Bo Zheng

The ability of reinforcement learning algorithms to learn effective policies is determined by the rewards available during training. However, for practical problems, obtaining large quantities of reward labels is often infeasible due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Shreyas Chaudhari , Renhao Zhang , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

We study the problem of sample efficient reinforcement learning, where prior data such as demonstrations are provided for initialization in lieu of a dense reward signal. A natural approach is to incorporate an imitation learning objective,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Perry Dong , Alec M. Lessing , Annie S. Chen , Chelsea Finn

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Vitchyr H. Pong , Rowan McAllister , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

While combining imitation learning (IL) and reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising way to address poor sample efficiency in autonomous behavior acquisition, methods that do so typically assume that the requisite behavior demonstrations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Caroline Wang , Garrett Warnell , Peter Stone

Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Simone Parisi , Alireza Kazemipour , Michael Bowling