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Robust reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance in the face of uncertainties. In this paper, we focus on action robust RL with the probabilistic policy execution uncertainty, in which,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Guanlin Liu , Zhihan Zhou , Han Liu , Lifeng Lai

By planning through a learned dynamics model, model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) offers the prospect of good performance with little environment interaction. However, it is common in practice for the learned model to be inaccurate,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-31 Behzad Haghgoo , Allan Zhou , Archit Sharma , Chelsea Finn

Single-task RL agents are typically trained under a fixed reward function, which limits their robustness to reward misspecification and their ability to adapt to changing preferences. We introduce Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan , Pieter Abbeel

Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a promising framework for autonomous driving by enabling agents to learn control policies through interaction with environments. However, large and high-dimensional action spaces often used to support…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Elahe Delavari , Feeza Khan Khanzada , Jaerock Kwon

To overcome the curse of dimensionality and curse of modeling in Dynamic Programming (DP) methods for solving classical Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are popular. In this paper, we consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-29 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

Contrastive reinforcement learning (CRL) learns goal-conditioned Q-values through a contrastive objective over state-action and goal representations, removing the need for hand-crafted reward functions. Despite impressive success in…

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to learn optimal decisions in unknown environments through experience of taking actions and observing the rewards gained. In some cases, the environment is not influenced by the actions of the RL…

Reinforcement Learning(RL) with sparse rewards is a major challenge. We propose \emph{Hindsight Trust Region Policy Optimization}(HTRPO), a new RL algorithm that extends the highly successful TRPO algorithm with \emph{hindsight} to tackle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Hanbo Zhang , Site Bai , Xuguang Lan , David Hsu , Nanning Zheng

Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) needs an environment to collect fresh data, which is impractical when online interactions are costly. Offline RL provides an alternative solution by directly learning from the previously collected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Han Zheng , Xufang Luo , Pengfei Wei , Xuan Song , Dongsheng Li , Jing Jiang

We investigate robustness to strong data corruption in offline sparse reinforcement learning (RL). In our setting, an adversary may arbitrarily perturb a fraction of the collected trajectories from a high-dimensional but sparse Markov…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-13 Nam Phuong Tran , Andi Nika , Goran Radanovic , Long Tran-Thanh , Debmalya Mandal

We work towards a unifying paradigm for accelerating policy optimization methods in reinforcement learning (RL) by integrating foresight in the policy improvement step via optimistic and adaptive updates. Leveraging the connection between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-07 Veronica Chelu , Tom Zahavy , Arthur Guez , Doina Precup , Sebastian Flennerhag

Many of the challenges facing today's reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, such as robustness, generalization, transfer, and computational efficiency are closely related to compression. Prior work has convincingly argued why minimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-08 Benjamin Eysenbach , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Sergey Levine

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) optimizes policies for reward but imposes few constraints on how decisions evolve over time. As a result, policies may achieve high performance while exhibiting temporally incoherent behavior such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Sukesh Subaharan

A variety of representation learning approaches have been investigated for reinforcement learning; much less attention, however, has been given to investigating the utility of sparse coding. Outside of reinforcement learning, sparse coding…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-07-27 Lei Le , Raksha Kumaraswamy , Martha White

This paper prescribes a suite of techniques for off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) that simplify the training process and reduce the sample complexity. First, we show that simple Deterministic Policy Gradient works remarkably well as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Rasool Fakoor , Pratik Chaudhari , Alexander J. Smola

Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to align large language models (LLMs). Off-policy methods offer greater implementation simplicity and data efficiency than on-policy techniques, but often result in suboptimal performance. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Charles Arnal , Gaëtan Narozniak , Vivien Cabannes , Yunhao Tang , Julia Kempe , Remi Munos

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been proven its efficiency in capturing users' dynamic interests in recent literature. However, training a DRL agent is challenging, because of the sparse environment in recommender systems (RS), DRL…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Xiaocong Chen , Siyu Wang , Lina Yao , Lianyong Qi , Yong Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in real-world decision-making across diverse domains, including gaming, robotics, online advertising, public health, and natural language processing. Despite these advances, a…

Applications · Statistics 2026-01-23 Asim H. Gazi , Yongyi Guo , Daiqi Gao , Ziping Xu , Kelly W. Zhang , Susan A. Murphy

Multi-goal reinforcement learning (RL) aims to qualify the agent to accomplish multi-goal tasks, which is of great importance in learning scalable robotic manipulation skills. However, reward engineering always requires strenuous efforts in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Deyu Yang , Hanbo Zhang , Xuguang Lan , Jishiyu Ding

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao