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Direct optimization is an appealing framework that replaces integration with optimization of a random objective for approximating gradients in models with discrete random variables. A$^\star$ sampling is a framework for optimizing such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Guy Lorberbom , Chris J. Maddison , Nicolas Heess , Tamir Hazan , Daniel Tarlow

The application of reinforcement learning (RL) in robotic control is still limited in the environments with sparse and delayed rewards. In this paper, we propose a practical self-imitation learning method named Self-Imitation Learning with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-26 Zhixin Chen , Mengxiang Lin

Recent advances in reinforcement-learning research have demonstrated impressive results in building algorithms that can out-perform humans in complex tasks. Nevertheless, creating reinforcement-learning systems that can build abstractions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Lucas Lehnert , Michael J. Frank , Michael L. Littman

Long-term temporal credit assignment is an important challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). It refers to the ability of the agent to attribute actions to consequences that may occur after a long time interval. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Tanmay Gangwani , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated its superiority on many complex sequential decision-making problems. However, heavy dependence on dense rewards and high sample-complexity impedes the wide adoption of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Zhuangdi Zhu , Kaixiang Lin , Bo Dai , Jiayu Zhou

Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Aviral Kumar , Xue Bin Peng , Sergey Levine

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) and dynamic discrete choice (DDC) models explain sequential decision-making by recovering reward functions that rationalize observed behavior. Flexible IRL methods typically rely on machine learning but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Lars van der Laan , Aurelien Bibaut , Nathan Kallus

To date, distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) methods have exclusively focused on the discounted setting, where an agent aims to optimize a discounted sum of rewards over time. In this work, we extend distributional RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Juan Sebastian Rojas , Chi-Guhn Lee

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to learn a reward function and a corresponding policy that best fit the demonstrated trajectories of an expert. However, current IRL works cannot learn incrementally from an ongoing trajectory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Shicheng Liu , Minghui Zhu

Recent advances in one-step text-to-image generation have enabled real-time synthesis with remarkable efficiency and quality. Previous reinforcement learning methods for one-step generators combine image-space reward optimization with…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Junyi Wu , Weijian Luo , Haoyang Zheng , Ruizhe Zhang , Guang Lin

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Minjae Cho , Huy Trong Tran

Transfer learning of prediction models has been extensively studied, while the corresponding policy learning approaches are rarely discussed. In this paper, we propose principled approaches for learning the optimal policy in the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Xueqing Liu , Qinwei Yang , Zhaoqing Tian , Ruocheng Guo , Peng Wu

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) is an approach that enables RL agents to learn from preference, which is particularly useful when formulating a reward function is challenging. Existing PbRL methods generally involve a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Gaon An , Junhyeok Lee , Xingdong Zuo , Norio Kosaka , Kyung-Min Kim , Hyun Oh Song

In continuous control, exploration is often performed through undirected strategies in which parameters of the networks or selected actions are perturbed by random noise. Although the deep setting of undirected exploration has been shown to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Baturay Saglam , Suleyman S. Kozat

In the search for more sample-efficient reinforcement-learning (RL) algorithms, a promising direction is to leverage as much external off-policy data as possible. For instance, expert demonstrations. In the past, multiple ideas have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Jesus Bujalance Martin , Fabien Moutarde

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is attractive in scenarios where reward engineering can be tedious. However, prior IRL algorithms use on-policy transitions, which require intensive sampling from the current policy for stable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Hana Hoshino , Kei Ota , Asako Kanezaki , Rio Yokota

The success of popular algorithms for deep reinforcement learning, such as policy-gradients and Q-learning, relies heavily on the availability of an informative reward signal at each timestep of the sequential decision-making process. When…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-26 Tanmay Gangwani , Qiang Liu , Jian Peng

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

Training a policy in a source domain for deployment in the target domain under a dynamics shift can be challenging, often resulting in performance degradation. Previous work tackles this challenge by training on the source domain with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-18 Yihong Guo , Yixuan Wang , Yuanyuan Shi , Pan Xu , Anqi Liu

Reward hacking arises when a model improves a proxy reward by exploiting shortcuts rather than solving the intended task. We study this failure mode through the geometry of reinforcement learning updates in language models and argue that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Wenlong Deng , Jiaji Huang , Kaan Ozkara , Yushu Li , Christos Thrampoulidis , Xiaoxiao Li , Youngsuk Park