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In practice, reinforcement learning (RL) agents are often trained with a possibly imperfect proxy reward function, which may lead to a human-agent alignment issue (i.e., the learned policy either converges to non-optimal performance with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Zhaohui Jiang , Xuening Feng , Paul Weng , Yifei Zhu , Yan Song , Tianze Zhou , Yujing Hu , Tangjie Lv , Changjie Fan

This paper introduces DiffTORI, which utilizes Differentiable Trajectory Optimization as the policy representation to generate actions for deep Reinforcement and Imitation learning. Trajectory optimization is a powerful and widely used…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Weikang Wan , Ziyu Wang , Yufei Wang , Zackory Erickson , David Held

This paper deals with distributed policy optimization in reinforcement learning, which involves a central controller and a group of learners. In particular, two typical settings encountered in several applications are considered:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Tianyi Chen , Kaiqing Zhang , Georgios B. Giannakis , Tamer Başar

Medical treatments often involve a sequence of decisions, each informed by previous outcomes. This process closely aligns with reinforcement learning (RL), a framework for optimizing sequential decisions to maximize cumulative rewards under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Ali Shirali , Alexander Schubert , Ahmed Alaa

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) shows great potential for optimizing multi-vehicle cooperative driving strategies through the state-action-reward feedback loop, but it still faces challenges such as low sample efficiency. This paper proposes a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Ye Han , Lijun Zhang , Dejian Meng , Zhuang Zhang

Online reinforcement learning is becoming increasingly important for aligning diffusion models with non-differentiable objectives. However, existing methods still face limitations in assigning fine-grained credit along denoising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zhengyang Liang , Qihang Zhang , Ceyuan Yang

We propose an inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) approach using Deep Q-Networks to extract the rewards in problems with large state spaces. We evaluate the performance of this approach in a simulation-based autonomous driving scenario.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-09-22 Sahand Sharifzadeh , Ioannis Chiotellis , Rudolph Triebel , Daniel Cremers

This paper proposes a novel deep reinforcement learning architecture that was inspired by previous tree structured architectures which were only useable in discrete action spaces. Policy Prediction Network offers a way to improve sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-18 Zac Wellmer , James Kwok

In recent years, the successor representation (SR) has attracted increasing attention in reinforcement learning (RL), and it has been used to address some of its key challenges, such as exploration, credit assignment, and generalization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Hon Tik Tse , Siddarth Chandrasekar , Marlos C. Machado

We consider the problem of reward learning for temporally extended tasks. For reward learning, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is a widely used paradigm. Given a Markov decision process (MDP) and a set of demonstrations for a task, IRL…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-14 Farzan Memarian , Zhe Xu , Bo Wu , Min Wen , Ufuk Topcu

With reinforcement learning, an agent could learn complex behaviors from high-level abstractions of the task. However, exploration and reward shaping remained challenging for existing methods, especially in scenarios where the extrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Jie Chen , Wenjun Xu

Self-imitation learning is a Reinforcement Learning (RL) method that encourages actions whose returns were higher than expected, which helps in hard exploration and sparse reward problems. It was shown to improve the performance of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-23 Johan Ferret , Olivier Pietquin , Matthieu Geist

Learning to solve complex goal-oriented tasks with sparse terminal-only rewards often requires an enormous number of samples. In such cases, using a set of expert trajectories could help to learn faster. However, Imitation Learning (IL) via…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Sujoy Paul , Jeroen van Baar , Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury

For many reinforcement learning (RL) applications, specifying a reward is difficult. This paper considers an RL setting where the agent obtains information about the reward only by querying an expert that can, for example, evaluate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 David Lindner , Matteo Turchetta , Sebastian Tschiatschek , Kamil Ciosek , Andreas Krause

Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) aims to learn a policy solving a set of training tasks simultaneously and quickly adapting to new tasks. It requires massive amounts of data drawn from training tasks to infer the common structure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-21 Yijie Guo , Qiucheng Wu , Honglak Lee

Recovering reward function from expert demonstrations is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning. The recovered reward function captures the motivation of the expert. Agents can imitate experts by following these reward functions in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Fan-Ming Luo , Xingchen Cao , Rong-Jun Qin , Yang Yu

Learning meaningful behaviors in the absence of reward is a difficult problem in reinforcement learning. A desirable and challenging unsupervised objective is to learn a set of diverse skills that provide a thorough coverage of the state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Pierre-Alexandre Kamienny , Jean Tarbouriech , Sylvain Lamprier , Alessandro Lazaric , Ludovic Denoyer

Diffusion-based robot navigation policies trained on large-scale imitation learning datasets, can generate multi-modal trajectories directly from the robot's visual observations, bypassing the traditional localization-mapping-planning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Junhe Sheng , Ruofei Bai , Kuan Xu , Ruimeng Liu , Jie Chen , Shenghai Yuan , Wei-Yun Yau , Lihua Xie

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) enables robots to perform some intelligent tasks end-to-end. However, there are still many challenges for long-horizon sparse-reward robotic manipulator tasks. On the one hand, a sparse-reward setting…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Guangming Wang , Minjian Xin , Wenhua Wu , Zhe Liu , Hesheng Wang