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Linear dynamical systems that obey stochastic differential equations are canonical models. While optimal control of known systems has a rich literature, the problem is technically hard under model uncertainty and there are hardly any…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-09 Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh , Mohamad Sadegh Shirani Faradonbeh

In many risk-aware and multi-objective reinforcement learning settings, the utility of the user is derived from the single execution of a policy. In these settings, making decisions based on the average future returns is not suitable. For…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-03 Conor F. Hayes , Mathieu Reymond , Diederik M. Roijers , Enda Howley , Patrick Mannion

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

State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive problem-solving capabilities but may struggle with complex reasoning and factual correctness. Existing methods harness the strengths of chain-of-thought and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Xingxuan Li , Weiwen Xu , Ruochen Zhao , Fangkai Jiao , Shafiq Joty , Lidong Bing

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Philippe Morere , Gilad Francis , Tom Blau , Fabio Ramos

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

This paper investigates methods for estimating the optimal stochastic control policy for a Markov Decision Process with unknown transition dynamics and an unknown reward function. This form of model-free reinforcement learning comprises…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Brandon Trabucco , Albert Qu , Simon Li , Ganeshkumar Ashokavardhanan

Achieving efficient and scalable exploration in complex domains poses a major challenge in reinforcement learning. While Bayesian and PAC-MDP approaches to the exploration problem offer strong formal guarantees, they are often impractical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-11-23 Bradly C. Stadie , Sergey Levine , Pieter Abbeel

We present a policy search method for learning complex feedback control policies that map from high-dimensional sensory inputs to motor torques, for manipulation tasks with discontinuous contact dynamics. We build on a prior technique…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-10-15 Yevgen Chebotar , Mrinal Kalakrishnan , Ali Yahya , Adrian Li , Stefan Schaal , Sergey Levine

We introduce a new algorithm for reinforcement learning called Maximum aposteriori Policy Optimisation (MPO) based on coordinate ascent on a relative entropy objective. We show that several existing methods can directly be related to our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-25 Abbas Abdolmaleki , Jost Tobias Springenberg , Yuval Tassa , Remi Munos , Nicolas Heess , Martin Riedmiller

Solving complex problems using reinforcement learning necessitates breaking down the problem into manageable tasks and learning policies to solve these tasks. These policies, in turn, have to be controlled by a master policy that takes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-09 Ambedkar Dukkipati , Rajarshi Banerjee , Ranga Shaarad Ayyagari , Dhaval Parmar Udaybhai

This paper concerns the problem of learning control policies for an unknown linear dynamical system to minimize a quadratic cost function. We present a method, based on convex optimization, that accomplishes this task robustly: i.e., we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-05 Jack Umenberger , Mina Ferizbegovic , Thomas B. Schön , Håkan Hjalmarsson

In this paper, we discuss the deterministic policy gradient using the Actor-Critic methods based on the linear compatible advantage function approximator, where the input spaces are continuous. When the policy is restricted by hard…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-04-07 Arash Bahari Kordabad , Hossein Nejatbakhsh Esfahani , Sebastien Gros

Black-box policy optimization is a class of reinforcement learning algorithms that explores and updates the policies at the parameter level. This class of algorithms is widely applied in robotics with movement primitives or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Marius Memmel , Puze Liu , Davide Tateo , Jan Peters

An effective approach to exploration in reinforcement learning is to rely on an agent's uncertainty over the optimal policy, which can yield near-optimal exploration strategies in tabular settings. However, in non-tabular settings that…

In online reinforcement learning (RL), efficient exploration remains particularly challenging in high-dimensional environments with sparse rewards. In low-dimensional environments, where tabular parameterization is possible, count-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-21 Tianjun Zhang , Paria Rashidinejad , Jiantao Jiao , Yuandong Tian , Joseph Gonzalez , Stuart Russell

Optimal decision-making under partial observability requires agents to balance reducing uncertainty (exploration) against pursuing immediate objectives (exploitation). In this paper, we introduce a novel policy optimization framework for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Hany Abdulsamad , Sahel Iqbal , Simo Särkkä

Bayesian approaches provide a principled solution to the exploration-exploitation trade-off in Reinforcement Learning. Typical approaches, however, either assume a fully observable environment or scale poorly. This work introduces the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-11-15 Sammie Katt , Frans Oliehoek , Christopher Amato

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to balance exploiting the current best strategy with exploring new options that could lead to higher rewards. Most common RL algorithms use undirected exploration, i.e., select random sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Bhavya Sukhija , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause , Pieter Abbeel , Carmelo Sferrazza

The combination of Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and deep reinforcement learning is state-of-the-art in two-player perfect-information games. In this paper, we describe a search algorithm that uses a variant of MCTS which we enhanced by 1)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Arta Seify , Michael Buro