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Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) improves the efficiency of long-horizon reinforcement-learning tasks with sparse rewards by decomposing the task into a hierarchy of subgoals. The main challenge of HRL is efficient discovery of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Sadegh Khorasani , Saber Salehkaleybar , Negar Kiyavash , Matthias Grossglauser

Reinforcement learning (RL), a common tool in decision making, learns control policies from various experiences based on the associated cumulative return/rewards without treating them differently. Humans, on the contrary, often learn to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

The options framework in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning breaks down overall goals into a combination of options or simpler tasks and associated policies, allowing for abstraction in the action space. Ideally, these options can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Kushal Chauhan , Soumya Chatterjee , Akash Reddy , Balaraman Ravindran , Pradeep Shenoy

Hierarchical reinforcement learning has demonstrated significant success at solving difficult reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. Previous works have motivated the use of hierarchy by appealing to a number of intuitive benefits, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Ofir Nachum , Haoran Tang , Xingyu Lu , Shixiang Gu , Honglak Lee , Sergey Levine

Recommender systems play a crucial role in mitigating the problem of information overload by suggesting users' personalized items or services. The vast majority of traditional recommender systems consider the recommendation procedure as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-28 Xiangyu Zhao , Liang Zhang , Long Xia , Zhuoye Ding , Dawei Yin , Jiliang Tang

How might we design Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based recommenders that encourage aligning user trajectories with the underlying user satisfaction? Three research questions are key: (1) measuring user satisfaction, (2) combatting sparsity…

While deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents outperform humans on an increasing number of tasks, training them requires data equivalent to decades of human gameplay. Recent hierarchical RL methods have increased sample efficiency by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Anna Penzkofer , Simon Schaefer , Florian Strohm , Mihai Bâce , Stefan Leutenegger , Andreas Bulling

Massive open online courses (MOOCs), which offer open access and widespread interactive participation through the internet, are quickly becoming the preferred method for online and remote learning. Several MOOC platforms offer the service…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-05-10 Jibing Gong , Yao Wan , Ye Liu , Xuewen Li , Yi Zhao , Cheng Wang , Yuting Lin , Xiaohan Fang , Wenzheng Feng , Jingyi Zhang , Jie Tang

Open-domain dialog generation is a challenging problem; maximum likelihood training can lead to repetitive outputs, models have difficulty tracking long-term conversational goals, and training on standard movie or online datasets may lead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-03 Abdelrhman Saleh , Natasha Jaques , Asma Ghandeharioun , Judy Hanwen Shen , Rosalind Picard

In this study, we investigate the use of global information to speed up the learning process and increase the cumulative rewards of reinforcement learning (RL) in competition tasks. Within the actor-critic RL, we introduce multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Zehong Cao , Chin-Teng Lin

Representation learning is essential for deep-neural-network-based recommender systems to capture user preferences and item features within fixed-dimensional user and item vectors. Unlike existing representation learning methods that either…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Riwei Lai , Li Chen , Weixin Chen , Rui Chen

How do people decide how long to continue in a task, when to switch, and to which other task? Understanding the mechanisms that underpin task interleaving is a long-standing goal in the cognitive sciences. Prior work suggests greedy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-01-08 Christoph Gebhardt , Antti Oulasvirta , Otmar Hilliges

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is a promising approach for managing task complexity across multiple levels of abstraction and accelerating long-horizon agent exploration. However, the effectiveness of hierarchical policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Xianghua Zeng , Hao Peng , Dingli Su , Angsheng Li

Given an input query, a recommendation model is trained using user feedback data (e.g., click data) to output a ranked list of items. In real-world systems, besides accuracy, an important consideration for a new model is novelty of its…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Amit Sharma , Hua Li , Xue Li , Jian Jiao

User interest modeling is critical for personalized news recommendation. Existing news recommendation methods usually learn a single user embedding for each user from their previous behaviors to represent their overall interest. However,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Tao Qi , Fangzhao Wu , Chuhan Wu , Peiru Yang , Yang Yu , Xing Xie , Yongfeng Huang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great promise in optimizing long-term user interest in recommender systems. However, existing RL-based recommendation methods need a large number of interactions for each user to learn a robust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-07 Yanan Wang , Yong Ge , Li Li , Rui Chen , Tong Xu

There are great interests as well as many challenges in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to recommendation systems. In this setting, an online user is the environment; neither the reward function nor the environment dynamics are clearly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-03 Xinshi Chen , Shuang Li , Hui Li , Shaohua Jiang , Yuan Qi , Le Song

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) enhances the scalability of decision-making in long-horizon tasks by introducing temporal abstraction through options-policies that span multiple timesteps. Despite its theoretical appeal, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Hemanath Arumugam , Falong Fan , Bo Liu

The complexity of designing reward functions has been a major obstacle to the wide application of deep reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. Describing an agent's desired behaviors and properties can be difficult, even for experts. A new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Wanqi Xue , Bo An , Shuicheng Yan , Zhongwen Xu

Reward design is a fundamental, yet challenging aspect of reinforcement learning (RL). Researchers typically utilize feedback signals from the environment to handcraft a reward function, but this process is not always effective due to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Alexander Bukharin , Yixiao Li , Pengcheng He , Tuo Zhao