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Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for decision-making in uncertain environments, but it often requires large amounts of data to learn an optimal policy. We address this challenge by incorporating prior model knowledge to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 J. S. van Hulst , W. P. M. H. Heemels , D. J. Antunes

Exploration is one of the most important tasks in Reinforcement Learning, but it is not well-defined beyond finite problems in the Dynamic Programming paradigm (see Subsection 2.4). We provide a reinterpretation of exploration which can be…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-24 John C. Raisbeck , Matthew W. Allen , Hakho Lee

How do you incentivize self-interested agents to $\textit{explore}$ when they prefer to $\textit{exploit}$? We consider complex exploration problems, where each agent faces the same (but unknown) MDP. In contrast with traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Max Simchowitz , Aleksandrs Slivkins

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents have great successes in solving tasks with large observation and action spaces from limited feedback. Still, training the agents is data-intensive and there are no guarantees that the learned behavior is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Helge Spieker

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Viraj Mehta , Ian Char , Joseph Abbate , Rory Conlin , Mark D. Boyer , Stefano Ermon , Jeff Schneider , Willie Neiswanger

A key challenge to deploying reinforcement learning in practice is avoiding excessive (harmful) exploration in individual episodes. We propose a natural constraint on exploration -- \textit{uniformly} outperforming a conservative policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Wanqiao Xu , Jason Yecheng Ma , Kan Xu , Hamsa Bastani , Osbert Bastani

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) faces significant challenges in addressing the hard-exploration problems in tasks with sparse or deceptive rewards and large state spaces. These challenges severely limit the practical application of DRL.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-03 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Ning Guo , Zhiming Zheng

This paper presents the concept of an adaptive safe padding that forces Reinforcement Learning (RL) to synthesise optimal control policies while ensuring safety during the learning process. Policies are synthesised to satisfy a goal,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Mohammadhosein Hasanbeig , Alessandro Abate , Daniel Kroening

Existing studies on constrained reinforcement learning (RL) may obtain a well-performing policy in the training environment. However, when deployed in a real environment, it may easily violate constraints that were originally satisfied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Zhongchang Sun , Sihong He , Fei Miao , Shaofeng Zou

For many applications of reinforcement learning it can be more convenient to specify both a reward function and constraints, rather than trying to design behavior through the reward function. For example, systems that physically interact…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-31 Joshua Achiam , David Held , Aviv Tamar , Pieter Abbeel

Meta reinforcement learning (RL) allows agents to leverage experience across a distribution of tasks on which the agent can train at will, enabling faster learning of optimal policies on new test tasks. Despite its success in improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Tingting Ni , Maryam Kamgarpour

While learning in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent should trade off exploration to discover new information about the MDP, and exploitation of the current knowledge to maximize the reward. Although the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Evrard Garcelon , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Alessandro Lazaric , Matteo Pirotta

In reinforcement learning, an agent attempts to learn high-performing behaviors through interacting with the environment, such behaviors are often quantified in the form of a reward function. However some aspects of behavior-such as ones…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Yiming Zhang , Quan Vuong , Keith W. Ross

This paper addresses the problem of maintaining safety during training in Reinforcement Learning (RL), such that the safety constraint violations are bounded at any point during learning. In a variety of RL applications the safety of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Rohan Mitta , Hosein Hasanbeig , Jun Wang , Daniel Kroening , Yiannis Kantaros , Alessandro Abate

The exploration \& exploitation dilemma poses significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, curiosity-based exploration methods achieved great success in tackling hard-exploration problems. However, they necessitate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Yiran Wang , Chenshu Liu , Yunfan Li , Sanae Amani , Bolei Zhou , Lin F. Yang

Reinforcement learning is commonly concerned with problems of maximizing accumulated rewards in Markov decision processes. Oftentimes, a certain goal state or a subset of the state space attain maximal reward. In such a case, the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Pavel Osinenko , Grigory Yaremenko , Georgiy Malaniya , Anton Bolychev , Alexander Gepperth

Equipping artificial agents with useful exploration mechanisms remains a challenge to this day. Humans, on the other hand, seem to manage the trade-off between exploration and exploitation effortlessly. In the present article, we put…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Marcel Binz , Eric Schulz

Recent rapid developments in reinforcement learning algorithms have been giving us novel possibilities in many fields. However, due to their exploring property, we have to take the risk into consideration when we apply those algorithms to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Yoshihiro Okawa , Tomotake Sasaki , Hitoshi Yanami , Toru Namerikawa

A common formulation of constrained reinforcement learning involves multiple rewards that must individually accumulate to given thresholds. In this class of problems, we show a simple example in which the desired optimal policy cannot be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-22 Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Santiago Paternain , Luiz F. O. Chamon , Alejandro Ribeiro

The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-25 Wuxia Chen , Taposh Banerjee , Jemin George , Carl Busart