English
Related papers

Related papers: Constrained Exploration in Reinforcement Learning …

200 papers

We present a new model-based algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) which consists of explicit exploration and exploitation phases, and is applicable in large or infinite state spaces. The algorithm maintains a set of dynamics models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Mikael Henaff

An agent must try new behaviors to explore and improve. In high-stakes environments, an agent that violates safety constraints may cause harm and must be taken offline, curtailing any future interaction. Imitating old behavior is safe, but…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Drew Prinster , Clara Fannjiang , Ji Won Park , Kyunghyun Cho , Anqi Liu , Suchi Saria , Samuel Stanton

Reinforcement learning is a proven technique for an agent to learn a task. However, when learning a task using reinforcement learning, the agent cannot distinguish the characteristics of the environment from those of the task. This makes it…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-08-10 Pieter Van Molle , Tim Verbelen , Steven Bohez , Sam Leroux , Pieter Simoens , Bart Dhoedt

In many sequential decision-making problems, the goal is to optimize a utility function while satisfying a set of constraints on different utilities. This learning problem is formalized through Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-05 Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor , Matteo Pirotta

Exploration is essential for reinforcement learning (RL). To face the challenges of exploration, we consider a reward-free RL framework that completely separates exploration from exploitation and brings new challenges for exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Chuheng Zhang , Yuanying Cai , Longbo Huang , Jian Li

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents typically learn memoryless policies---policies that only consider the last observation when selecting actions. Learning memoryless policies is efficient and optimal in fully observable environments.…

Existing exploration strategies in reinforcement learning (RL) often either ignore the history or feedback of search, or are complicated to implement. There is also a very limited literature showing their effectiveness over diverse domains.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Xing Wang , Alexander Vinel

We address the problem of reinforcement learning in which observations may exhibit an arbitrary form of stochastic dependence on past observations and actions, i.e. environments more general than (PO)MDPs. The task for an agent is to attain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2009-12-30 Daniil Ryabko , Marcus Hutter

Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a single policy that effectively solves multiple tasks at the same time. This paper presents a constrained formulation for multi-task RL where the goal is to maximize the average…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-07 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

In order to satisfy safety conditions, an agent may be constrained from acting freely. A safe controller can be designed a priori if an environment is well understood, but not when learning is employed. In particular, reinforcement learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-15 Eleanor Quint , Dong Xu , Samuel Flint , Stephen Scott , Matthew Dwyer

Controllable Markov chains describe the dynamics of sequential decision making tasks and are the central component in optimal control and reinforcement learning. In this work, we give the general form of an optimal policy for learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Peter N. Loxley

Recent works have studied *state entropy maximization* in reinforcement learning, in which the agent's objective is to learn a policy inducing high entropy over states visitation (Hazan et al., 2019). They typically assume full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Riccardo Zamboni , Duilio Cirino , Marcello Restelli , Mirco Mutti

We present a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for controlling particle accelerator experiments that builds explainable physics-based constraints on agent behavior. The goal is to increase transparency and trust by letting users verify…

Accelerator Physics · Physics 2025-03-04 Jonathan Colen , Malachi Schram , Kishansingh Rajput , Armen Kasparian

Cyber and cyber-physical systems equipped with machine learning algorithms such as autonomous cars share environments with humans. In such a setting, it is important to align system (or agent) behaviors with the preferences of one or more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Arezoo Rajabi , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Abdullah Al Maruf , Radha Poovendran

In safe offline reinforcement learning (RL), the objective is to develop a policy that maximizes cumulative rewards while strictly adhering to safety constraints, utilizing only offline data. Traditional methods often face difficulties in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Prajwal Koirala , Zhanhong Jiang , Soumik Sarkar , Cody Fleming

This paper investigates the automatic exploration problem under the unknown environment, which is the key point of applying the robotic system to some social tasks. The solution to this problem via stacking decision rules is impossible to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-07-24 Haoran Li , Qichao Zhang , Dongbin Zhao

Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) generally suffers from poor sample complexity, mostly due to the need to exhaustively explore the state-action space to find well-performing policies. On the other hand, we postulate that expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Loris Di Natale , Bratislav Svetozarevic , Philipp Heer , Colin N. Jones

Reinforcement learning has been established over the past decade as an effective tool to find optimal control policies for dynamical systems, with recent focus on approaches that guarantee safety during the learning and/or execution phases.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-10-06 S M Nahid Mahmud , Scott A Nivison , Zachary I. Bell , Rushikesh Kamalapurkar

We investigate the task of learning to follow natural language instructions by jointly reasoning with visual observations and language inputs. In contrast to existing methods which start with learning from demonstrations (LfD) and then use…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-07-10 Wenhan Xiong , Xiaoxiao Guo , Mo Yu , Shiyu Chang , Bowen Zhou , William Yang Wang

In real world settings, numerous constraints are present which are hard to specify mathematically. However, for the real world deployment of reinforcement learning (RL), it is critical that RL agents are aware of these constraints, so that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-24 Usman Anwar , Shehryar Malik , Alireza Aghasi , Ali Ahmed