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Not having access to compact and meaningful representations is known to significantly increase the complexity of reinforcement learning (RL). For this reason, it can be useful to perform state representation learning (SRL) before tackling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-16 Astrid Merckling , Nicolas Perrin-Gilbert , Alex Coninx , Stéphane Doncieux

Random exploration is one of the main mechanisms through which reinforcement learning (RL) finds well-performing policies. However, it can lead to undesirable or catastrophic outcomes when learning online in safety-critical environments. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-15 Djordje Grbic , Sebastian Risi

Hierarchical abstractions, also known as options -- a type of temporally extended action (Sutton et. al. 1999) that enables a reinforcement learning agent to plan at a higher level, abstracting away from the lower-level details. In this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-22 Daniel J. Mankowitz , Aviv Tamar , Shie Mannor

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) excels in various control tasks, yet the absence of safety guarantees hampers its real-world applicability. In particular, explorations during learning usually results in safety violations, while the RL…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Yifan Sun , Feihan Li , Weiye Zhao , Rui Chen , Tianhao Wei , Changliu Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) involves sequential decision making in uncertain environments. The aim of the decision-making agent is to maximize the benefit of acting in its environment over an extended period of time. Finding an optimal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Istvan Szita , Balint Takacs , Andras Lorincz

We consider the problem of finding optimal policies for a Markov Decision Process with almost sure constraints on state transitions and action triplets. We define value and action-value functions that satisfy a barrier-based decomposition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Agustin Castellano , Juan Bazerque , Enrique Mallada

Reinforcement learning (RL) is the dominant paradigm for sharpening strategic tool use capabilities of LLMs on long-horizon, sparsely-rewarded agent tasks, yet it faces a fundamental challenge of exploration-exploitation trade-off. Existing…

We address the problem of deploying a reinforcement learning (RL) agent on a physical system such as a datacenter cooling unit or robot, where critical constraints must never be violated. We show how to exploit the typically smooth dynamics…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-01-29 Gal Dalal , Krishnamurthy Dvijotham , Matej Vecerik , Todd Hester , Cosmin Paduraru , Yuval Tassa

Everything else being equal, simpler models should be preferred over more complex ones. In reinforcement learning (RL), simplicity is typically quantified on an action-by-action basis -- but this timescale ignores temporal regularities,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Tankred Saanum , Noémi Éltető , Peter Dayan , Marcel Binz , Eric Schulz

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

Understanding emerging behaviors of reinforcement learning (RL) agents may be difficult since such agents are often trained in complex environments using highly complex decision making procedures. This has given rise to a variety of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-12-02 Mira Finkelstein , Lucy Liu , Nitsan Levy Schlot , Yoav Kolumbus , David C. Parkes , Jeffrey S. Rosenshein , Sarah Keren

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a trending field of research, showing great promise in challenging problems such as playing Atari, solving Go and controlling robots. While DRL agents perform well in practice we are still lacking the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-06-17 Nir Baram , Tom Zahavy , Shie Mannor

An important facet of reinforcement learning (RL) has to do with how the agent goes about exploring the environment. Traditional exploration strategies typically focus on efficiency and ignore safety. However, for practical applications,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-23 Jiameng Fan , Wenchao Li

In this paper, we consider a transfer Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem in continuous state and action spaces, under unobserved contextual information. For example, the context can represent the mental view of the world that an expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Chenyu Liu , Yan Zhang , Yi Shen , Michael M. Zavlanos

In reinforcement learning, we typically refer to unsupervised pre-training when we aim to pre-train a policy without a priori access to the task specification, i.e. rewards, to be later employed for efficient learning of downstream tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Riccardo Zamboni , Mirco Mutti , Marcello Restelli

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as a promising approach for solving Combinatorial Optimization (CO) problems, such as the 3D Bin Packing Problem (3D-BPP), Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), or Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Han Fang , Paul Weng , Yutong Ban

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular machine learning paradigm where intelligent agents interact with the environment to fulfill a long-term goal. Driven by the resurgence of deep learning, Deep RL (DRL) has witnessed great success over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Yunpeng Qing , Shunyu Liu , Jie Song , Yang Zhou , Kaixuan Chen , Huiqiong Wang , Mingli Song

We propose a novel Reinforcement Learning model for discrete environments, which is inherently interpretable and supports the discovery of deep subgoal hierarchies. In the model, an agent learns information about environment in the form of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-16 Alexander Demin , Denis Ponomaryov

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) enables agents to learn optimal behaviors through interaction with their environment and has been increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, including autonomous driving. Despite its promise, RL is…