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Chaotic dynamical systems pose a fundamental challenge for Reinforcement Learning (RL): exponential sensitivity to initial conditions induces high-variance bootstrap targets and poorly conditioned gradient updates. Chaotic dynamics arise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 James Rudd-Jones , Mirco Musolesi , María Pérez-Ortiz

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-06 Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou

In distributed optimization, the practical problem-solving performance is essentially sensitive to algorithm selection, parameter setting, problem type and data pattern. Thus, it is often laborious to acquire a highly efficient method for a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-04 Daokuan Zhu , Tianqi Xu , Jie Lu

Although deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have made important achievements in many control tasks, they still suffer from the problems of sample inefficiency and unstable training process, which are usually caused by sparse…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-02-28 Ke Lin , Liang Gong , Xudong Li , Te Sun , Binhao Chen , Chengliang Liu , Zhengfeng Zhang , Jian Pu , Junping Zhang

We investigate what specific design choices enable successful online reinforcement learning (RL) on physical robots. Across 100 real-world training runs on three distinct robotic platforms, we systematically ablate algorithmic, systems, and…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is challenged by the distributional shift between learning policies and datasets. To address this problem, existing works mainly focus on designing sophisticated algorithms to explicitly or implicitly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Yang Yue , Bingyi Kang , Xiao Ma , Zhongwen Xu , Gao Huang , Shuicheng Yan

A random recurrent neural network, called a reservoir, can be used to learn robot movements conditioned on context inputs that encode task goals. The Learning is achieved by mapping the random dynamics of the reservoir modulated by context…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Zahra Koulaeizadeh , Erhan Oztop

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

Learning robot control policies from demonstrations is a powerful paradigm, yet real-world data is often suboptimal, noisy, or otherwise imperfect, posing significant challenges for imitation and reinforcement learning. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Aniruddh G. Puranic , Sebastian Schirmer , John S. Baras , Calin Belta

The problem of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in an unknown nonlinear dynamical system is equivalent to the search for an optimal feedback law utilizing the simulations/ rollouts of the dynamical system. Most RL techniques search over a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-25 Ran Wang , Karthikeya S. Parunandi , Aayushman Sharma , Raman Goyal , Suman Chakravorty

Pretraining reinforcement learning (RL) models on offline datasets is a promising way to improve their training efficiency in online tasks, but challenging due to the inherent mismatch in dynamics and behaviors across various tasks. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Minting Pan , Yitao Zheng , Yunbo Wang , Xiaokang Yang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated significant potential in certain real-world industrial applications, yet its broader deployment remains limited by inherent challenges such as sample inefficiency and unstable learning dynamics.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Tom Maus , Asma Atamna , Tobias Glasmachers

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) provides an intuitive and fast approach to program robotic manipulators. Task parameterized representations allow easy adaptation to new scenes and online observations. However, this approach has been…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-10 An T. Le , Meng Guo , Niels van Duijkeren , Leonel Rozo , Robert Krug , Andras G. Kupcsik , Mathias Buerger

Many real world tasks exhibit rich structure that is repeated across different parts of the state space or in time. In this work we study the possibility of leveraging such repeated structure to speed up and regularize learning. We start…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great promise with algorithms learning in environments with large state and action spaces purely from scalar reward signals. A crucial challenge for current deep RL algorithms is that they require a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Shivakanth Sujit , Pedro H. M. Braga , Jorg Bornschein , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising methodology for training robot controllers. However, most results have been limited to simulation due to the need for a large number of samples and the lack of automated-yet-safe data…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-03-29 Kendall Lowrey , Svetoslav Kolev , Jeremy Dao , Aravind Rajeswaran , Emanuel Todorov

Optimal control strategies are often combined with safety certificates to ensure both performance and safety in safety-critical systems. A prominent example is combining Model Predictive Control (MPC) with Control Barrier Functions (CBF).…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-05 Kerim Dzhumageldyev , Filippo Airaldi , Azita Dabiri

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) has proven to be a data efficient approach for learning control tasks but is difficult to utilize in domains with complex observations such as images. In this paper, we present a method for learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Marvin Zhang , Sharad Vikram , Laura Smith , Pieter Abbeel , Matthew J. Johnson , Sergey Levine

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

Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Andreas Doerr , Michael Volpp , Marc Toussaint , Sebastian Trimpe , Christian Daniel