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Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved tremendous success in recent years. However, the classical foundations of RL do not account for the risk sensitivity of the objective function, which is critical in various fields, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Mohammad Alipour-Vaezi , Huaiyang Zhong , Kwok-Leung Tsui , Sajad Khodadadian

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models, yet how to explicitly steer training toward exploration or exploitation remains an open problem. We introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Wenlong Deng , Yi Ren , Yushu Li , Boying Gong , Danica J. Sutherland , Xiaoxiao Li , Christos Thrampoulidis

Providing a suitable reward function to reinforcement learning can be difficult in many real world applications. While inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) holds promise for automatically learning reward functions from demonstrations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Lantao Yu , Tianhe Yu , Chelsea Finn , Stefano Ermon

An agent learning through interactions should balance its action selection process between probing the environment to discover new rewards and using the information acquired in the past to adopt useful behaviour. This trade-off is usually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-02 Lucas Beyer , Damien Vincent , Olivier Teboul , Sylvain Gelly , Matthieu Geist , Olivier Pietquin

Q-shaping is an extension of Q-value initialization and serves as an alternative to reward shaping for incorporating domain knowledge to accelerate agent training, thereby improving sample efficiency by directly shaping Q-values. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Xiefeng Wu

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) can help avoid sophisticated reward designs and align better with human intentions, showing great promise in various real-world applications. However, obtaining human feedback for preferences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Yiqin Yang , Hao Hu , Yihuan Mao , Jin Zhang , Chengjie Wu , Yuhua Jiang , Xu Yang , Runpeng Xie , Yi Fan , Bo Liu , Yang Gao , Bo Xu , Chongjie Zhang

Recent work on exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) has led to a series of increasingly complex solutions to the problem. This increase in complexity often comes at the expense of generality. Recent empirical studies suggest that,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-03 Will Dabney , Georg Ostrovski , André Barreto

Empowered by deep neural networks, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has demonstrated tremendous empirical successes in various domains, including games, health care, and autonomous driving. Despite these advancements, DRL is still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-22 Dayang Liang , Yaru Zhang , Yunlong Liu

Deep Research agents tackle knowledge-intensive tasks through multi-round retrieval and decision-oriented generation. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been shown to improve performance in this paradigm, its contributions remain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yinuo Xu , Shuo Lu , Jianjie Cheng , Meng Wang , Qianlong Xie , Xingxing Wang , Ran He , Jian Liang

An effective approach to exploration in reinforcement learning is to rely on an agent's uncertainty over the optimal policy, which can yield near-optimal exploration strategies in tabular settings. However, in non-tabular settings that…

In recent years, the successor representation (SR) has attracted increasing attention in reinforcement learning (RL), and it has been used to address some of its key challenges, such as exploration, credit assignment, and generalization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Hon Tik Tse , Siddarth Chandrasekar , Marlos C. Machado

Continuous control Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches are known to suffer from estimation biases, leading to suboptimal policies. This paper introduces innovative methods in RL, focusing on addressing and exploiting estimation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Niccolò Turcato , Alberto Sinigaglia , Alberto Dalla Libera , Ruggero Carli , Gian Antonio Susto

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

In reinforcement learning (RL), the ability to utilize prior knowledge from previously solved tasks can allow agents to quickly solve new problems. In some cases, these new problems may be approximately solved by composing the solutions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-02 Jacob Adamczyk , Argenis Arriojas , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

Evolution strategies (ES) are a family of black-box optimization algorithms able to train deep neural networks roughly as well as Q-learning and policy gradient methods on challenging deep reinforcement learning (RL) problems, but are much…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-31 Edoardo Conti , Vashisht Madhavan , Felipe Petroski Such , Joel Lehman , Kenneth O. Stanley , Jeff Clune

Exploratory data analytics (EDA) is a sequential decision making process where analysts choose subsequent queries that might lead to some interesting insights based on the previous queries and corresponding results. Data processing systems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-14 Shaddy Garg , Subrata Mitra , Tong Yu , Yash Gadhia , Arjun Kashettiwar

In many predictive contexts (e.g., credit lending), true outcomes are only observed for samples that were positively classified in the past. These past observations, in turn, form training datasets for classifiers that make future…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Vijay Keswani , Anay Mehrotra , L. Elisa Celis

Reinforcement learning (RL) has successfully automated the complex process of mining formulaic alpha factors, for creating interpretable and profitable investment strategies. However, existing methods are hampered by the sparse rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Junjie Zhao , Chengxi Zhang , Chenkai Wang , Peng Yang

The explore{exploit dilemma is one of the central challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Bayesian RL solves the dilemma by providing the agent with information in the form of a prior distribution over environments; however, full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-19 Jonathan Sorg , Satinder Singh , Richard L. Lewis

Meta-reinforcement learning (RL) methods can meta-train policies that adapt to new tasks with orders of magnitude less data than standard RL, but meta-training itself is costly and time-consuming. If we can meta-train on offline data, then…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-08 Vitchyr H. Pong , Ashvin Nair , Laura Smith , Catherine Huang , Sergey Levine