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The success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the ability to learn robust representations from the observations of the environment. In most cases, the representations learned purely by the reinforcement learning loss can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Somjit Nath , Rushiv Arora , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

This paper presents a novel model-free Reinforcement Learning algorithm for learning behavior in continuous action, state, and goal spaces. The algorithm approximates optimal value functions using non-parametric estimators. It is able to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-08-28 Andreas Gerken , Michael Spranger

While Variational Inference (VI) is central to modern generative models like Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) and Denoising Diffusion Models (DDMs), its pedagogical treatment is split across disciplines. In statistics, VI is typically framed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-22 Yen-Chi Chen

Inverse Reinforcement Learning infers a reward function from expert demonstrations, aiming to encode the behavior and intentions of the expert. Current approaches usually do this with generative and uni-modal models, meaning that they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-16 Niklas Freymuth , Philipp Becker , Gerhard Neumann

Online reinforcement learning in complex tasks is time-consuming, as massive interaction steps are needed to learn the optimal Q-function.Vision-language action (VLA) policies represent a promising direction for solving diverse tasks;…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Xiefeng Wu , Jing Zhao , Shu Zhang , Mingyu Hu

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of finding a reward function that generates a given optimal policy for a given Markov Decision Process. This paper looks at an algorithmic-independent geometric analysis of the IRL problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-19 Abi Komanduru , Jean Honorio

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks where extrinsic rewards from environments are sparse or even totally disregarded. Significant advances based on intrinsic motivation show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Chenjia Bai , Peng Liu , Kaiyu Liu , Lingxiao Wang , Yingnan Zhao , Lei Han

Intelligent agents must pursue their goals in complex environments with partial information and often limited computational capacity. Reinforcement learning methods have achieved great success by creating agents that optimize engineered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Alejandro Daniel Noel , Charel van Hoof , Beren Millidge

The aim of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is to infer an agent's preferences from observing their behaviour. Usually, preferences are modelled as a reward function, $R$, and behaviour is modelled as a policy, $\pi$. One of the central…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Joar Skalse , Alessandro Abate

Meta-reinforcement learning trains a single reinforcement learning agent on a distribution of tasks to quickly generalize to new tasks outside of the training set at test time. From a Bayesian perspective, one can interpret this as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Joery A. de Vries , Jinke He , Mathijs M. de Weerdt , Matthijs T. J. Spaan

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is the problem of finding a reward function which describes observed/known expert behavior. The IRL setting is remarkably useful for automated control, in situations where the reward function is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-12 Gregory Dexter , Kevin Bello , Jean Honorio

Imitation learning (IL) has achieved considerable success in solving complex sequential decision-making problems. However, current IL methods mainly assume that the environment for learning policies is the same as the environment for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Siyuan Li , Xun Wang , Rongchang Zuo , Kewu Sun , Lingfei Cui , Jishiyu Ding , Peng Liu , Zhe Ma

Reinforcement learning (RL) is concerned with how intelligence agents take actions in a given environment to maximize the cumulative reward they receive. In healthcare, applying RL algorithms could assist patients in improving their health…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-21 Chengchun Shi

Visual model-based RL methods typically encode image observations into low-dimensional representations in a manner that does not eliminate redundant information. This leaves them susceptible to spurious variations -- changes in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Chuning Zhu , Max Simchowitz , Siri Gadipudi , Abhishek Gupta

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

Imitation learning (IL) is a framework that learns to imitate expert behavior from demonstrations. Recently, IL shows promising results on high dimensional and control tasks. However, IL typically suffers from sample inefficiency in terms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-24 Lihua Zhang

We present Sequential Neural Variational Inference (SNVI), an approach to perform Bayesian inference in models with intractable likelihoods. SNVI combines likelihood-estimation (or likelihood-ratio-estimation) with variational inference to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-20 Manuel Glöckler , Michael Deistler , Jakob H. Macke

In a probabilistic latent variable model, factorized (or mean-field) variational inference (F-VI) fits a separate parametric distribution for each latent variable. Amortized variational inference (A-VI) instead learns a common inference…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-27 Charles C. Margossian , David M. Blei

When learning to behave in a stochastic environment where safety is critical, such as driving a vehicle in traffic, it is natural for human drivers to plan fallback strategies as a backup to use if ever there is an unexpected change in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-12 Ugo Lecerf , Christelle Yemdji-Tchassi , Sébastien Aubert , Pietro Michiardi

Variational inference is a popular technique to approximate a possibly intractable Bayesian posterior with a more tractable one. Recently, boosting variational inference has been proposed as a new paradigm to approximate the posterior by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-08 Francesco Locatello , Rajiv Khanna , Joydeep Ghosh , Gunnar Rätsch