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Model-based reinforcement learning strategies are believed to exhibit more significant sample complexity than model-free strategies to control dynamical systems,such as quadcopters.This belief that Model-based strategies that involve the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-02 Ashutosh Kumar Tiwari , Sandeep Varma Nadimpalli

Fast adaptation to new tasks is extremely important for embodied agents in the real world. Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) has emerged as an effective method to enable fast adaptation in unknown environments. Compared to on-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Menglong Zhang , Fuyuan Qian , Quanying Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been extensively employed in a wide range of decision-making problems, such as games and robotics. Recently, diffusion policies have shown strong potential in modeling multi-modal behaviors, enabling more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Ben Liu , Shunpeng Yang , Hua Chen

Meta-reinforcement learning (RL) addresses the problem of sample inefficiency in deep RL by using experience obtained in past tasks for a new task to be solved. However, most meta-RL methods require partially or fully on-policy data, i.e.,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Takahisa Imagawa , Takuya Hiraoka , Yoshimasa Tsuruoka

Offline reinforcement learning aims to utilize datasets of previously gathered environment-action interaction records to learn a policy without access to the real environment. Recent work has shown that offline reinforcement learning can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Hanhan Zhou , Tian Lan , Vaneet Aggarwal

Evolution Strategies (ES) have emerged as a scalable gradient-free alternative to reinforcement learning based LLM fine-tuning, but it remains unclear whether comparable task performance implies comparable solutions in parameter space. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 William Hoy , Binxu Wang , Xu Pan

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) methods in offline domains without additional online data collection, such as mobile health applications. Most of existing policy optimization algorithms in the computer science literature are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-28 Chengchun Shi , Shikai Luo , Yuan Le , Hongtu Zhu , Rui Song

While off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are sample efficient due to gradient-based updates and data reuse in the replay buffer, they struggle with convergence to local optima due to limited exploration. On the other hand,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Bowen Zheng , Ran Cheng

A common belief in model-free reinforcement learning is that methods based on random search in the parameter space of policies exhibit significantly worse sample complexity than those that explore the space of actions. We dispel such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-20 Horia Mania , Aurelia Guy , Benjamin Recht

A common strategy in transfer learning is few shot fine-tuning, but its success is highly dependent on the quality of samples selected as training examples. Active learning methods such as uncertainty sampling and diversity sampling can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Wei Han , David Martinez , Anna Khanina , Lawrence Cavedon , Karin Verspoor

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

In this paper, we aim to develop a simple and scalable reinforcement learning algorithm that uses standard supervised learning methods as subroutines. Our goal is an algorithm that utilizes only simple and convergent maximum likelihood loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-09 Xue Bin Peng , Aviral Kumar , Grace Zhang , Sergey Levine

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from three core difficulties: temporal credit assignment with sparse rewards, lack…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Shauharda Khadka , Kagan Tumer

Evolutionary algorithms have been used to evolve a population of actors to generate diverse experiences for training reinforcement learning agents, which helps to tackle the temporal credit assignment problem and improves the exploration…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-04-21 Chengpeng Hu , Jiyuan Pei , Jialin Liu , Xin Yao

Although Deep Reinforcement Learning has proven highly effective for complex decision-making problems, it demands significant computational resources and careful parameter adjustment in order to develop successful strategies. Evolution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Adrian Martínez , Ananya Gupta , Hanka Goralija , Mario Rico , Saúl Fenollosa , Tamar Alphaidze

Evolution Strategies (ESs) have recently become popular for training deep neural networks, in particular on reinforcement learning tasks, a special form of controller design. Compared to classic problems in continuous direct search, deep…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-07-03 Nils Müller , Tobias Glasmachers

Tree Search (TS) is crucial to some of the most influential successes in reinforcement learning. Here, we tackle two major challenges with TS that limit its usability: \textit{distribution shift} and \textit{scalability}. We first discover…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Assaf Hallak , Gal Dalal , Steven Dalton , Iuri Frosio , Shie Mannor , Gal Chechik

In this work, we consider the problem of model selection for deep reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world environments. Typically, the performance of deep RL algorithms is evaluated via on-policy interactions with the target environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Alex Irpan , Kanishka Rao , Konstantinos Bousmalis , Chris Harris , Julian Ibarz , Sergey Levine

An evolution strategy (ES) variant based on a simplification of a natural evolution strategy recently attracted attention because it performs surprisingly well in challenging deep reinforcement learning domains. It searches for neural…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-05-03 Joel Lehman , Jay Chen , Jeff Clune , Kenneth O. Stanley

Residual Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular approach for adapting pretrained policies by learning a lightweight residual policy that provides corrective actions. While Residual RL is more sample-efficient than finetuning the entire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Lakshita Dodeja , Karl Schmeckpeper , Shivam Vats , Thomas Weng , Mingxi Jia , George Konidaris , Stefanie Tellex