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Policy gradient methods are widely adopted reinforcement learning algorithms for tasks with continuous action spaces. These methods succeeded in many application domains, however, because of their notorious sample inefficiency their use…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-20 Davide Mambelli , Stephan Bongers , Onno Zoeter , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Frans A. Oliehoek

In this extended abstract, we discuss the opportunity to formally verify that inference systems for probabilistic programming guarantee good performance. In particular, we focus on hybrid inference systems that combine exact and approximate…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2023-07-17 Eric Atkinson , Ellie Y. Cheng , Guillaume Baudart , Louis Mandel , Michael Carbin

Model-based algorithms, which learn a dynamics model from logged experience and perform some sort of pessimistic planning under the learned model, have emerged as a promising paradigm for offline reinforcement learning (offline RL).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-28 Tianhe Yu , Aviral Kumar , Rafael Rafailov , Aravind Rajeswaran , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

Efficient exploration is a crucial challenge in deep reinforcement learning. Several methods, such as behavioral priors, are able to leverage offline data in order to efficiently accelerate reinforcement learning on complex tasks. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-01 Marco Bagatella , Sammy Christen , Otmar Hilliges

Current methods for end-to-end constructive neural combinatorial optimization usually train a policy using behavior cloning from expert solutions or policy gradient methods from reinforcement learning. While behavior cloning is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Jonathan Pirnay , Dominik G. Grimm

Many real-world sequential decision-making problems involve critical systems with financial risks and human-life risks. While several works in the past have proposed methods that are safe for deployment, they assume that the underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-21 Yash Chandak , Scott M. Jordan , Georgios Theocharous , Martha White , Philip S. Thomas

This paper introduces a novel, computationally-efficient algorithm for predictive inference (PI) that requires no distributional assumptions on the data and can be computed faster than existing bootstrap-type methods for neural networks.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-13 Yue Gao , Garvesh Raskutti , Rebecca Willet

Challenging manipulation tasks can be solved effectively by combining individual robot skills, which must be parameterized for the concrete physical environment and task at hand. This is time-consuming and difficult for human programmers,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-07-15 Benjamin Alt , Darko Katic , Rainer Jäkel , Asil Kaan Bozcuoglu , Michael Beetz

In recent years, trust region on-policy reinforcement learning has achieved impressive results in addressing complex control tasks and gaming scenarios. However, contemporary state-of-the-art algorithms within this category primarily…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Weiye Zhao , Feihan Li , Yifan Sun , Rui Chen , Tianhao Wei , Changliu Liu

Generations from large language models (LLMs) can be improved by sampling and scoring multiple solutions to select a final answer. Current "sample and select" methods such as self-consistency (SC) rely on majority voting to score answers.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Han Wang , Archiki Prasad , Elias Stengel-Eskin , Mohit Bansal

Safe reinforcement learning aims to learn the optimal policy while satisfying safety constraints, which is essential in real-world applications. However, current algorithms still struggle for efficient policy updates with hard constraint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Linrui Zhang , Li Shen , Long Yang , Shixiang Chen , Bo Yuan , Xueqian Wang , Dacheng Tao

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have seen remarkable progress, but key challenges remain. Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) is known for ensuring monotonic policy improvement through conservative updates within a trust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Zhengpeng Xie , Qiang Zhang , Fan Yang , Marco Hutter , Renjing Xu

This paper proposes a simulation-based reinforcement learning algorithm for controlling systems with uncertain and varying system parameters. While simulators are useful for safely learning control policies, the reality gap remains a major…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-14 Junya Ikemoto

Policy optimization is an effective reinforcement learning approach to solve continuous control tasks. Recent achievements have shown that alternating online and offline optimization is a successful choice for efficient trajectory reuse.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-01 Alberto Maria Metelli , Matteo Papini , Francesco Faccio , Marcello Restelli

Algorithmic recommendations and decisions have become ubiquitous in today's society. Many of these data-driven policies, especially in the realm of public policy, are based on known, deterministic rules to ensure their transparency and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-02 Eli Ben-Michael , D. James Greiner , Kosuke Imai , Zhichao Jiang

On-policy reinforcement learning methods, like Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), often demand extensive data per update, leading to sample inefficiency. This paper introduces Reflective Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Yaozhong Gan , Renye Yan , Zhe Wu , Junliang Xing

Vanilla Reinforcement Learning (RL) can efficiently solve complex tasks but does not provide any guarantees on system behavior. To bridge this gap, we propose a three-step safe RL procedure for continuous action spaces that provides…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-09-29 Hanna Krasowski , Prithvi Akella , Aaron D. Ames , Matthias Althoff

A precondition for the deployment of a Reinforcement Learning agent to a real-world system is to provide guarantees on the learning process. While a learning algorithm will eventually converge to a good policy, there are no guarantees on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-27 Paul Daoudi , Mathias Formoso , Othman Gaizi , Achraf Azize , Evrard Garcelon

Assessing the capabilities and risks of frontier AI systems is a critical area of research, and recent work has shown that repeated sampling from models can dramatically increase both. For instance, repeated sampling has been shown to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Joshua Kazdan , Rylan Schaeffer , Youssef Allouah , Colin Sullivan , Kyssen Yu , Noam Levi , Sanmi Koyejo

The success of the model predictive path integral control (MPPI) approach depends on the appropriate selection of the input distribution used for sampling. However, it can be challenging to select inputs that satisfy output constraints in…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-16 Leon , Yan , Santosh Devasia