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Interacting with the actual environment to acquire data is often costly and time-consuming in robotic tasks. Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a feasible solution. On the one hand, it eliminates the requirements of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Pengqin Wang , Meixin Zhu , Shaojie Shen

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) leverages the in-context learning capabilities of transformer models (TMs) to efficiently generalize to unseen sequential decision-making tasks without parameter updates. However, existing ICRL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Juncheng Dong , Bowen He , Moyang Guo , Ethan X. Fang , Zhuoran Yang , Vahid Tarokh

In machine learning for sequential decision-making, an algorithmic agent learns to interact with an environment while receiving feedback in the form of a reward signal. However, in many unstructured real-world settings, such a reward signal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Ellen Novoseller , Vinicius G. Goecks , David Watkins , Josh Miller , Nicholas Waytowich

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents optimize only the features specified in a reward function and are indifferent to anything left out inadvertently. This means that we must not only specify what to do, but also the much larger space of what…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-22 Rohin Shah , Dmitrii Krasheninnikov , Jordan Alexander , Pieter Abbeel , Anca Dragan

While reinforcement learning (RL) provides a framework for learning through trial and error, translating RL algorithms into the real world has remained challenging. A major hurdle to real-world application arises from the development of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-12 Archit Sharma , Rehaan Ahmad , Chelsea Finn

Human-designed reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL) agents are frequently misaligned with the humans' true, unobservable objectives, and thus act only as proxies. Optimizing for a misspecified proxy reward function often induces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Stephane Hatgis-Kessell , Logan Mondal Bhamidipaty , Emma Brunskill

In the long term, reinforcement learning (RL) is considered by many AI theorists to be the most promising path to artificial general intelligence. This places RL practitioners in a position to design systems that have never existed before…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-14 Thomas Krendl Gilbert , Sarah Dean , Tom Zick , Nathan Lambert

The reinforcement learning paradigm allows, in principle, for complex behaviours to be learned directly from simple reward signals. In practice, however, it is common to carefully hand-design the reward function to encourage a particular…

We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Nadav Merlis

In this paper, we investigate offline reinforcement learning (RL) with the goal of training a single robust policy that generalizes effectively across environments with unseen dynamics. We propose a novel approach, Trajectory Encoding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Batıkan Bora Ormancı , Phillip Swazinna , Steffen Udluft , Thomas A. Runkler

Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a new field in robot learning, where humans play a pivotal role in shaping robot behavior by expressing preferences on different sequences of state-action pairs. However,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Simon Holk , Daniel Marta , Iolanda Leite

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for neural combinatorial optimization, enabling models to learn heuristics that solve complex problems without requiring expert knowledge. Despite significant progress, existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Mingjun Pan , Guanquan Lin , You-Wei Luo , Bin Zhu , Zhien Dai , Lijun Sun , Chun Yuan

Classic reinforcement learning (RL) frequently confronts challenges in tasks involving delays, which cause a mismatch between received observations and subsequent actions, thereby deviating from the Markov assumption. Existing methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Bo Xia , Yilun Kong , Yongzhe Chang , Bo Yuan , Zhiheng Li , Xueqian Wang , Bin Liang

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

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms struggle with learning optimal policies for tasks where reward feedback is sparse and depends on a complex sequence of events in the environment. Probabilistic reward machines (PRMs) are finite-state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jan Corazza , Hadi Partovi Aria , Daniel Neider , Zhe Xu

We introduce Reward-Zero, a general-purpose implicit reward mechanism that transforms natural-language task descriptions into dense, semantically grounded progress signals for reinforcement learning (RL). Reward-Zero serves as a simple yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Heng Zhang , Haddy Alchaer , Arash Ajoudani , Yu She

In this paper, we investigate the problem of offline Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) with human feedback where feedback is available in the form of preference between trajectory pairs rather than explicit rewards. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Wenhao Zhan , Masatoshi Uehara , Nathan Kallus , Jason D. Lee , Wen Sun

When Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents are deployed in practice, they might impact their environment and change its dynamics. We propose a new framework to model this phenomenon, where the current environment depends on the deployed policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Ben Rank , Stelios Triantafyllou , Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic