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In continuing tasks, average-reward reinforcement learning may be a more appropriate problem formulation than the more common discounted reward formulation. As usual, learning an optimal policy in this setting typically requires a large…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Yuqian Jiang , Sudarshanan Bharadwaj , Bo Wu , Rishi Shah , Ufuk Topcu , Peter Stone

Children can rapidly generalize compositionally-constructed rules to unseen test sets. On the other hand, deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to be trained over millions of episodes, and their ability to generalize to unseen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Zijun Lin , Haidi Azaman , M Ganesh Kumar , Cheston Tan

We study the problem of learning control policies for complex tasks given by logical specifications. Recent approaches automatically generate a reward function from a given specification and use a suitable reinforcement learning algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Kishor Jothimurugan , Suguman Bansal , Osbert Bastani , Rajeev Alur

Static feature exclusion strategies often fail to prevent bias when hidden dependencies influence the model predictions. To address this issue, we explore a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that integrates bias mitigation and automated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sudip Khadka , L. S. Paudel

Reward shaping has been applied widely to accelerate Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents' training. However, a principled way of designing effective reward shaping functions, especially for complex continuous control problems, remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Mateo Juliani , Mingxuan Li , Elias Bareinboim

We study the problem of deployment efficient reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation under the \emph{reward-free} exploration setting. This is a well-motivated problem because deploying new policies is costly in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Dan Qiao , Yu-Xiang Wang

Reward functions are central in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding agents towards optimal decision-making. The complexity of RL tasks requires meticulously designed reward functions that effectively drive learning while avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Rati Devidze

It is desirable for an agent to be able to solve a rich variety of problems that can be specified through language in the same environment. A popular approach towards obtaining such agents is to reuse skills learned in prior tasks to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Geraud Nangue Tasse , Devon Jarvis , Steven James , Benjamin Rosman

A key impediment to reinforcement learning (RL) in real applications with limited, batch data is defining a reward function that reflects what we implicitly know about reasonable behaviour for a task and allows for robust off-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Niranjani Prasad , Barbara E Engelhardt , Finale Doshi-Velez

An agent's ability to leverage past experience is critical for efficiently solving new tasks. Prior work has focused on using value function estimates to obtain zero-shot approximations for solutions to a new task. In soft Q-learning, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Jacob Adamczyk , Volodymyr Makarenko , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

The success of reinforcement learning (RL) crucially depends on effective function approximation when dealing with complex ground-truth models. Existing sample-efficient RL algorithms primarily employ three approaches to function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Yunfan Li , Lin Yang

In reinforcement learning, conducting task composition by forming cohesive, executable sequences from multiple tasks remains challenging. However, the ability to (de)compose tasks is a linchpin in developing robotic systems capable of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Georgios Bakirtzis , Michail Savvas , Ruihan Zhao , Sandeep Chinchali , Ufuk Topcu

Reward shaping is an effective technique for incorporating domain knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as potential-based reward shaping normally make full use of a given shaping reward function. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-06 Yujing Hu , Weixun Wang , Hangtian Jia , Yixiang Wang , Yingfeng Chen , Jianye Hao , Feng Wu , Changjie Fan

There is a surge of interest in using formal languages such as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) to precisely and succinctly specify complex tasks and derive reward functions for Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, existing methods often assign…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Minjae Kwon , Ingy ElSayed-Aly , Lu Feng

This paper studies a recent proposal to use randomized value functions to drive exploration in reinforcement learning. These randomized value functions are generated by injecting random noise into the training data, making the approach…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Daniel Russo

Zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim at instantly producing a behavior for an RL task in a given environment, from a description of the reward function. These methods are usually tested by evaluating their average performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Yann Ollivier

The emergence of compositional reasoning in large language models through reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been a key driver of recent empirical successes. Despite this progress, it remains unclear which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Daniel Barzilai , Yotam Wolf , Ronen Basri

Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task. This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Dhawal Gupta , Yash Chandak , Scott M. Jordan , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

The classical theory of reinforcement learning (RL) has focused on tabular and linear representations of value functions. Further progress hinges on combining RL with modern function approximators such as kernel functions and deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Zhuoran Yang , Chi Jin , Zhaoran Wang , Mengdi Wang , Michael I. Jordan

There has been significant progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) in recent years. Nevertheless, finding suitable hyperparameter configurations and reward functions remains challenging even for experts, and performance heavily relies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Julian Dierkes , Emma Cramer , Holger H. Hoos , Sebastian Trimpe