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In reward-free reinforcement learning (RL), an agent explores the environment first without any reward information, in order to achieve certain learning goals afterwards for any given reward. In this paper we focus on reward-free RL under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Yuan Cheng , Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

Offline reinforcement learning (offline RL) considers problems where learning is performed using only previously collected samples and is helpful for the settings in which collecting new data is costly or risky. In model-based offline RL,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Mustafa O. Karabag , Ufuk Topcu

In complex environments with high dimension, training a reinforcement learning (RL) model from scratch often suffers from lengthy and tedious collection of agent-environment interactions. Instead, leveraging expert demonstration to guide RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Zhaorun Chen , Binhao Chen , Shenghan Xie , Liang Gong , Chengliang Liu , Zhengfeng Zhang , Junping Zhang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) requires a large amount of exploration especially in sparse-reward settings. Imitation Learning (IL) can learn from expert demonstrations without exploration, but it never exceeds the expert's performance and is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Ryoya Ogishima , Izumi Karino , Yasuo Kuniyoshi

We consider the offline reinforcement learning problem, where the aim is to learn a decision making policy from logged data. Offline RL -- particularly when coupled with (value) function approximation to allow for generalization in large or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-31 Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy , David Simchi-Levi , Yunzong Xu

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

We study the problem of Reinforcement Learning (RL) with linear function approximation, i.e. assuming the optimal action-value function is linear in a known $d$-dimensional feature mapping. Unfortunately, however, based on only this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Zeyu Jia , Randy Jia , Dhruv Madeka , Dean P. Foster

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

Model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular learning paradigm due to its potential sample efficiency compared to model-free RL. However, existing empirical model-based RL approaches lack the ability to explore. This work studies a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Yuda Song , Wen Sun

One of the key approaches to save samples in reinforcement learning (RL) is to use knowledge from an approximate model such as its simulator. However, how much does an approximate model help to learn a near-optimal policy of the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 Fei Feng , Wotao Yin , Lin F. Yang

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn an individual task. While in principle meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms enable agents to learn new skills from small amounts of experience,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-21 Kate Rakelly , Aurick Zhou , Deirdre Quillen , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated its superiority on many complex sequential decision-making problems. However, heavy dependence on dense rewards and high sample-complexity impedes the wide adoption of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Zhuangdi Zhu , Kaixiang Lin , Bo Dai , Jiayu Zhou

Reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for data science decision-making but suffers from sample inefficiency, particularly in real-world scenarios with costly physical interactions. This paper introduces a novel human-inspired framework to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Ali Beikmohammadi , Sindri Magnússon

Although model-based reinforcement learning (RL) approaches are considered more sample efficient, existing algorithms are usually relying on sophisticated planning algorithm to couple tightly with the model-learning procedure. Hence the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Xiaoyu Chen , Jiachen Hu , Lin F. Yang , Liwei Wang

In the era of deep reinforcement learning, making progress is more complex, as the collected experience must be compressed into a deep model for future exploitation and sampling. Many papers have shown that training a deep learning policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Glen Berseth

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) considers the setting where the agent does not have access to a reward function during exploration, but must propose a near-optimal policy for an arbitrary reward function revealed only after…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Andrew Wagenmaker , Yifang Chen , Max Simchowitz , Simon S. Du , Kevin Jamieson

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental framework for sequential decision-making, in which an agent learns an optimal policy through interactions with an unknown environment. In settings with function approximation, many existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ruiquan Huang , Donghao Li , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved great success in sequential decision-making problems, but often at the cost of a large number of agent-environment interactions. To improve sample efficiency, methods like Reinforcement Learning from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Muhan Hou , Koen Hindriks , A. E. Eiben , Kim Baraka

Given a dataset of expert demonstrations, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover a reward for which the expert is optimal. This work proposes a model-free algorithm to solve entropy-regularized IRL problem. In particular, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Titouan Renard , Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Tingting Ni , Maryam Kamgarpour

We initiate the mathematical study of replicability as an algorithmic property in the context of reinforcement learning (RL). We focus on the fundamental setting of discounted tabular MDPs with access to a generative model. Inspired by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Amin Karbasi , Grigoris Velegkas , Lin F. Yang , Felix Zhou