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In many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL), performing actions requires consuming certain types of resources that are non-replenishable in each episode. Typical applications include robotic control with limited energy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Zhihai Wang , Taoxing Pan , Qi Zhou , Jie Wang

Safety is critical when applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. As a result, safe RL has emerged as a fundamental and powerful paradigm for optimizing an agent's policy while incorporating notions of safety. A prevalent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Akifumi Wachi , Xun Shen , Yanan Sui

We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation, where the agent works in two phases: (1) in the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment but cannot access the reward; and (2) in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Junkai Zhang , Weitong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

In risk-averse reinforcement learning (RL), the goal is to optimize some risk measure of the returns. A risk measure often focuses on the worst returns out of the agent's experience. As a result, standard methods for risk-averse RL often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Ido Greenberg , Yinlam Chow , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Shie Mannor

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

This paper studies reward-agnostic exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) -- a scenario where the learner is unware of the reward functions during the exploration stage -- and designs an algorithm that improves over the state of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Gen Li , Yuling Yan , Yuxin Chen , Jianqing Fan

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown exceptional performance across various applications, enabling autonomous agents to learn optimal policies through interaction with their environments. However, traditional RL frameworks often face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Rui Liu , Anish Gupta , Erfaun Noorani , Pratap Tokekar

We introduce Random Latent Exploration (RLE), a simple yet effective exploration strategy in reinforcement learning (RL). On average, RLE outperforms noise-based methods, which perturb the agent's actions, and bonus-based exploration, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Srinath Mahankali , Zhang-Wei Hong , Ayush Sekhari , Alexander Rakhlin , Pulkit Agrawal

Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems are being considered under increasingly more complex structures. While tabular and linear models have been thoroughly explored, the analytical study of RL under nonlinear function approximation,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Aya Kayal , Sattar Vakili , Laura Toni , Alberto Bernacchia

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for decision processes with non-Markovian reward, in which high-level knowledge of the task in the form of reward machines is available to the learner. We consider probabilistic reward machines with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Hippolyte Bourel , Anders Jonsson , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Chenxiao Ma , Mohammad Sadegh Talebi

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for robotic navigation, allowing robots to learn through trial and error. However, real-world robotic tasks often suffer from sparse rewards, leading to inefficient exploration and…

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for deploying RL agents in real-world applications, as it aims to maximize long-term rewards while satisfying safety constraints. However, safe RL often suffers from sample inefficiency, requiring…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Shangding Gu , Laixi Shi , Yuhao Ding , Alois Knoll , Costas Spanos , Adam Wierman , Ming Jin

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for learning safe behaviors without engaging in risky online interactions with the environment. Most existing methods in offline safe RL rely on cost constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Ze Gong , Akshat Kumar , Pradeep Varakantham

Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) extracts knowledge from previous tasks and achieves fast adaptation to new tasks. Despite recent progress, efficient exploration in meta-RL remains a key challenge in sparse-reward tasks, as it requires…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-15 Jin Zhang , Jianhao Wang , Hao Hu , Tong Chen , Yingfeng Chen , Changjie Fan , Chongjie Zhang

We present a new model-based algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) which consists of explicit exploration and exploitation phases, and is applicable in large or infinite state spaces. The algorithm maintains a set of dynamics models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Mikael Henaff

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be effective in many scenarios. However, it typically requires the exploration of a sufficiently large number of state-action pairs, some of which may be unsafe. Consequently, its application to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-24 Yousef Emam , Gennaro Notomista , Paul Glotfelter , Zsolt Kira , Magnus Egerstedt

We study the problem of exploration in Reinforcement Learning and present a novel model-free solution. We adopt an information-theoretical viewpoint and start from the instance-specific lower bound of the number of samples that have to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

Reinforcement learning (RL) in the real world necessitates the development of procedures that enable agents to explore without causing harm to themselves or others. The most successful solutions to the problem of safe RL leverage offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Alexander Quessy , Thomas Richardson , Sebastian East

Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated notable progress in sample efficiency, spanning both model-based and model-free paradigms. Despite the identification and mitigation of specific bottlenecks in prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yibo Wang , Jiang Zhao

Safety is one of the main challenges in applying reinforcement learning to realistic environmental tasks. To ensure safety during and after training process, existing methods tend to adopt overly conservative policy to avoid unsafe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Xiao Zhang , Hai Zhang , Hongtu Zhou , Chang Huang , Di Zhang , Chen Ye , Junqiao Zhao