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Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) environments, whether in robotics or industrial settings, often involve non-visual observations and require not only efficient but also reliable and thus interpretable and flexible RL approaches. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-19 Moritz Lange , Noah Krystiniak , Raphael C. Engelhardt , Wolfgang Konen , Laurenz Wiskott

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover the reward function of an expert agent from demonstrations of behavior. It is well-known that the IRL problem is fundamentally ill-posed, i.e., many reward functions can explain the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Filippo Lazzati , Mirco Mutti , Alberto Maria Metelli

Training sophisticated agents for optimal decision-making under uncertainty has been key to the rapid development of modern autonomous systems across fields. Notably, model-free reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled decision-making agents…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Thomas Banker , Ali Mesbah

Reinforcement learning (RL) and causal modelling naturally complement each other. The goal of causal modelling is to predict the effects of interventions in an environment, while the goal of reinforcement learning is to select interventions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Oliver Schulte , Pascal Poupart

Innate values describe agents' intrinsic motivations, which reflect their inherent interests and preferences for pursuing goals and drive them to develop diverse skills that satisfy their various needs. Traditional reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Qin Yang

Humans are masters at quickly learning many complex tasks, relying on an approximate understanding of the dynamics of their environments. In much the same way, we would like our learning agents to quickly adapt to new tasks. In this paper,…

Reinforcement learning suffers from limitations in real practices primarily due to the number of required interactions with virtual environments. It results in a challenging problem because we are implausible to obtain a local optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Qizhen Wu , Kexin Liu , Lei Chen

Variational inference (VI) is a method to approximate the computationally intractable posterior distributions that arise in Bayesian statistics. Typically, VI fits a simple parametric distribution to the target posterior by minimizing an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-18 Chirag Modi , Charles Margossian , Yuling Yao , Robert Gower , David Blei , Lawrence Saul

Modern Reinforcement Learning (RL) is commonly applied to practical problems with an enormous number of states, where function approximation must be deployed to approximate either the value function or the policy. The introduction of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-09 Chi Jin , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Michael I. Jordan

Generalized variational inference (GVI) provides an optimization-theoretic framework for statistical estimation that encapsulates many traditional estimation procedures. The typical GVI problem is to compute a distribution of parameters…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-27 Aurya S. Javeed , Drew P. Kouri , Thomas M. Surowiec

Agents that interact with other agents often do not know a priori what the other agents' strategies are, but have to maximise their own online return while interacting with and learning about others. The optimal adaptive behaviour under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-19 Luisa Zintgraf , Sam Devlin , Kamil Ciosek , Shimon Whiteson , Katja Hofmann

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a branch of machine learning which is employed to solve various sequential decision making problems without proper supervision. Due to the recent advancement of deep learning, the newly proposed Deep-RL…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-04-17 Dhruv Ramani

In offline reinforcement learning (RL) an optimal policy is learned solely from a priori collected observational data. However, in observational data, actions are often confounded by unobserved variables. Instrumental variables (IVs), in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-16 Luofeng Liao , Zuyue Fu , Zhuoran Yang , Yixin Wang , Mladen Kolar , Zhaoran Wang

The quintessential model-based reinforcement-learning agent iteratively refines its estimates or prior beliefs about the true underlying model of the environment. Recent empirical successes in model-based reinforcement learning with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-02 Dilip Arumugam , Benjamin Van Roy

It is well known that reinforcement learning can be cast as inference in an appropriate probabilistic model. However, this commonly involves introducing a distribution over agent trajectories with probabilities proportional to exponentiated…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-10-07 David Tolpin , Tomer Dobkin

Variational inference is a powerful approach for approximate posterior inference. However, it is sensitive to initialization and can be subject to poor local optima. In this paper, we develop proximity variational inference (PVI). PVI is a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-26 Jaan Altosaar , Rajesh Ranganath , David M. Blei

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) shows promise of applying RL to real-world problems by effectively utilizing previously collected data. Most existing offline RL algorithms use regularization or constraints to suppress extrapolation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Xiaoteng Ma , Yiqin Yang , Hao Hu , Qihan Liu , Jun Yang , Chongjie Zhang , Qianchuan Zhao , Bin Liang

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims at learning an optimal control from a fixed dataset, without interactions with the system. An agent in this setting should avoid selecting actions whose consequences cannot be predicted from the…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a machine learning approach that trains agents to maximize cumulative rewards through interactions with environments. The integration of RL with deep learning has recently resulted in impressive achievements…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Hui Bai , Ran Cheng , Yaochu Jin

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) infers a reward function from demonstrations, allowing for policy improvement and generalization. However, despite much recent interest in IRL, little work has been done to understand the minimum set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-19 Daniel S. Brown , Scott Niekum