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The performance of off-policy learning, including deep Q-learning and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG), critically depends on the choice of the exploration policy. Existing exploration methods are mostly based on adding noise to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-28 Tianbing Xu , Qiang Liu , Liang Zhao , Jian Peng

The policy gradient approach is a flexible and powerful reinforcement learning method particularly for problems with continuous actions such as robot control. A common challenge in this scenario is how to reduce the variance of policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-18 Tingting Zhao , Hirotaka Hachiya , Voot Tangkaratt , Jun Morimoto , Masashi Sugiyama

Direct policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning are a successful approach for a variety of reasons: they are model free, they directly optimize the performance metric of interest, and they allow for richly parameterized policies.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-14 Alekh Agarwal , Mikael Henaff , Sham Kakade , Wen Sun

Exploration is a key challenge in Reinforcement Learning, especially in long-horizon, deceptive and sparse-reward environments. For such applications, population-based approaches have proven effective. Methods such as Quality-Diversity…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-11-24 Bryan Lim , Manon Flageat , Antoine Cully

Efficient exploration remains a major challenge for reinforcement learning. One reason is that the variability of the returns often depends on the current state and action, and is therefore heteroscedastic. Classical exploration strategies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-26 Nikolay Nikolov , Johannes Kirschner , Felix Berkenkamp , Andreas Krause

IoT networks often face conflicting routing goals such as maximizing packet delivery, minimizing delay, and conserving limited battery energy. These priorities can also change dynamically: for example, an emergency alert requires high…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Shubham Vaishnav , Praveen Kumar Donta , Sindri Magnússon

We study reinforcement learning from human feedback in general Markov decision processes, where agents learn from trajectory-level preference comparisons. A central challenge in this setting is to design algorithms that select informative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Reda Ouhamma , Maryam Kamgarpour

A default assumption in the design of reinforcement-learning algorithms is that a decision-making agent always explores to learn optimal behavior. In sufficiently complex environments that approach the vastness and scale of the real world,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Dilip Arumugam , Saurabh Kumar , Ramki Gummadi , Benjamin Van Roy

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

Network slicing promises to provision diversified services with distinct requirements in one infrastructure. Deep reinforcement learning (e.g., deep $\mathcal{Q}$-learning, DQL) is assumed to be an appropriate algorithm to solve the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-12 Chen Qi , Yuxiu Hua , Rongpeng Li , Zhifeng Zhao , Honggang Zhang

Deep reinforcement learning for high dimensional, hierarchical control tasks usually requires the use of complex neural networks as functional approximators, which can lead to inefficiency, instability and even divergence in the training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Yuguang Yang

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

Many decision-making problems feature multiple objectives. In such problems, it is not always possible to know the preferences of a decision-maker for different objectives. However, it is often possible to observe the behavior of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-04-28 Junlin Lu , Patrick Mannion , Karl Mason

Energy-based policies offer a flexible framework for modeling complex, multimodal behaviors in reinforcement learning (RL). In maximum entropy RL, the optimal policy is a Boltzmann distribution derived from the soft Q-function, but direct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Vineet Jain , Tara Akhound-Sadegh , Siamak Ravanbakhsh

The use of guidance to steer sampling toward desired outcomes has been widely explored within diffusion models, especially in applications such as image and trajectory generation. However, incorporating guidance during training remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Marvin Alles , Nutan Chen , Patrick van der Smagt , Botond Cseke

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to discover better actions through exploration. However, typical exploration techniques aim to maximize rewards, often incurring high costs in both exploration and learning processes. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Akane Tsuboya , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi

Eliciting preferences from human judgements is inherently imprecise, yet most decision analysis methods force a single priority vector from pairwise comparisons, discarding the information embedded in inconsistencies. We instead leverage…

General Economics · Economics 2026-02-27 Salvatore Greco , Sajid Siraj , Michele Lundy

We state the problem of inverse reinforcement learning in terms of preference elicitation, resulting in a principled (Bayesian) statistical formulation. This generalises previous work on Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning and allows us…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2011-06-30 Constantin Rothkopf , Christos Dimitrakakis

Preference-based reward learning is a popular technique for teaching robots and autonomous systems how a human user wants them to perform a task. Previous works have shown that actively synthesizing preference queries to maximize…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Evan Ellis , Gaurav R. Ghosal , Stuart J. Russell , Anca Dragan , Erdem Bıyık

The quality of data driven learning algorithms scales significantly with the quality of data available. One of the most straight-forward ways to generate good data is to sample or explore the data source intelligently. Smart sampling can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-24 Steffen Gracla , Carsten Bockelmann , Armin Dekorsy