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Efficient truck dispatching via Reinforcement Learning (RL) in open-pit mining is often hindered by reliance on complex reward engineering and value-based methods. This paper introduces Curriculum-inspired Adaptive Direct Policy Guidance, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Shi Meng , Bin Tian , Xiaotong Zhang

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) has progressed significantly toward accurately learning the underlying rewards in both discrete and continuous domains from behavior data. The next advance is to learn {\em intrinsic} preferences in ways…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yikang Gui , Prashant Doshi

The framework of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) provides a powerful and widely applicable mathematical formalization for sequential decision-making. This paper present a novel DRL framework, termed \emph{$f$-Divergence Reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-15 Chen Gong , Qiang He , Yunpeng Bai , Zhou Yang , Xiaoyu Chen , Xinwen Hou , Xianjie Zhang , Yu Liu , Guoliang Fan

It is of significance for an agent to learn a widely applicable and general-purpose policy that can achieve diverse goals including images and text descriptions. Considering such perceptually-specific goals, the frontier of deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Jinxin Liu , Donglin Wang , Qiangxing Tian , Zhengyu Chen

Diffusion and flow models achieve State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) generative performance, yet many practically important behaviors such as fine-grained prompt fidelity, compositional correctness, and text rendering are weakly specified by score or…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Yuanzhi Zhu , Xi Wang , Stéphane Lathuilière , Vicky Kalogeiton

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have emerged as a popular choice for training an efficient and effective dialogue policy. However, these methods suffer from sparse and unstable reward signals returned by a user simulator only when a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-18 Ziming Li , Sungjin Lee , Baolin Peng , Jinchao Li , Julia Kiseleva , Maarten de Rijke , Shahin Shayandeh , Jianfeng Gao

Actor critic methods with sparse rewards in model-based deep reinforcement learning typically require a deterministic binary reward function that reflects only two possible outcomes: if, for each step, the goal has been achieved or not. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Juan Vargas , Lazar Andjelic , Amir Barati Farimani

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Vitchyr H. Pong , Rowan McAllister , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for recommender systems, enabling effective policy learning by interacting with frozen world models. However, the reward functions in these world models,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Yi Zhang , Ruihong Qiu , Xuwei Xu , Jiajun Liu , Sen Wang

Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Cevahir Koprulu , Ufuk Topcu

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is typically formulated as maximizing entropy subject to matching the distribution of expert trajectories. Classical (dual-ascent) IRL guarantees monotonic performance improvement but requires fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Anish Diwan , Davide Tateo , Christopher E. Mower , Haitham Bou-Ammar , Jan Peters , Oleg Arenz

Training a deep neural network to maximize a target objective has become the standard recipe for successful machine learning over the last decade. These networks can be optimized with supervised learning, if the target objective is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Bernhard Jaeger , Andreas Geiger

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

Agents that can learn to imitate given video observation -- \emph{without direct access to state or action information} are more applicable to learning in the natural world. However, formulating a reinforcement learning (RL) agent that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-14 Glen Berseth , Florian Golemo , Christopher Pal

Sparse training is a natural idea to accelerate the training speed of deep neural networks and save the memory usage, especially since large modern neural networks are significantly over-parameterized. However, most of the existing methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Xiao Zhou , Weizhong Zhang , Zonghao Chen , Shizhe Diao , Tong Zhang

A significant challenge for the practical application of reinforcement learning in the real world is the need to specify an oracle reward function that correctly defines a task. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to avoid this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-16 Kelvin Xu , Ellis Ratner , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

Prioritized Experience Replay (PER) enables the model to learn more about relatively important samples by artificially changing their accessed frequencies. However, this non-uniform sampling method shifts the state-action distribution that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Zhuoying Chen , Huiping Li , Zhaoxu Wang

Offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) mitigates the need for reward definition, aligning with human preferences via preference-driven reward feedback without interacting with the environment. However, trajectory-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Teng Pang , Bingzheng Wang , Guoqiang Wu , Yilong Yin

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as an efficient approach to resource allocation due to its strong capability in handling complex decision-making tasks. However, only limited research has explored the training of DRL models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Aohan Li , Miyu Tsuzuki

The remarkable success of contrastive-learning-based multimodal models has been greatly driven by training on ever-larger datasets with expensive compute consumption. Sample selection as an alternative efficient paradigm plays an important…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Zihua Zhao , Feng Hong , Mengxi Chen , Pengyi Chen , Benyuan Liu , Jiangchao Yao , Ya Zhang , Yanfeng Wang