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Reinforcement learning suffers from limitations in real practices primarily due to the number of required interactions with virtual environments. It results in a challenging problem because we are implausible to obtain a local optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Qizhen Wu , Kexin Liu , Lei Chen

A long-standing goal in AI is to develop agents capable of solving diverse tasks across a range of environments, including those never seen during training. Two dominant paradigms address this challenge: (i) reinforcement learning (RL),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Vlad Sobal , Wancong Zhang , Kyunghyun Cho , Randall Balestriero , Tim G. J. Rudner , Yann LeCun

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) describes the problem of learning an unknown reward function of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from observed behavior of an agent. Since the agent's behavior originates in its policy and MDP policies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-04-14 Michael Herman , Tobias Gindele , Jörg Wagner , Felix Schmitt , Wolfram Burgard

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy that maximizes the expected return using a given static dataset of transitions. However, offline RL faces the distribution shift problem. The policy constraint offline RL method is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Yuanhao Chen , Qi Liu , Pengbin Chen , Zhongjian Qiao , Yanjie Li

We study offline Reinforcement Learning in large infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the reward and transition models are linearly realizable under a known feature map. Starting from the classic linear-program…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Gergely Neu , Nneka Okolo

Imitation learning (IL) enables agents to acquire skills directly from expert demonstrations, providing a compelling alternative to reinforcement learning. However, prior online IL approaches struggle with complex tasks characterized by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Shangzhe Li , Zhiao Huang , Hao Su

We study the problem of representation transfer in offline Reinforcement Learning (RL), where a learner has access to episodic data from a number of source tasks collected a priori, and aims to learn a shared representation to be used in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Avinandan Bose , Simon Shaolei Du , Maryam Fazel

Learning efficiently a causal model of the environment is a key challenge of model-based RL agents operating in POMDPs. We consider here a scenario where the learning agent has the ability to collect online experiences through direct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-29 Maxime Gasse , Damien Grasset , Guillaume Gaudron , Pierre-Yves Oudeyer

Offline Reinforcement learning is commonly used for sequential decision-making in domains such as healthcare and education, where the rewards are known and the transition dynamics $T$ must be estimated on the basis of batch data. A key…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-10 Leo Benac , Sonali Parbhoo , Finale Doshi-Velez

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful, general tool for learning complex behaviors. However, its sample efficiency is often impractically large for solving challenging real-world problems, even with off-policy algorithms such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 Vitchyr Pong , Shixiang Gu , Murtaza Dalal , Sergey Levine

Offline learning is a key part of making reinforcement learning (RL) useable in real systems. Offline RL looks at scenarios where there is data from a system's operation, but no direct access to the system when learning a policy. Recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Arthur Argenson , Gabriel Dulac-Arnold

In this paper, we leverage ideas from model-based control to address the sample efficiency problem of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Accelerating learning is an active field of RL highly relevant in the context of time-varying…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-05-23 Ibrahim Ahmed , Marcos Quinones-Grueiro , Gautam Biswas

We investigate the fundamental problem of leveraging offline data to accelerate online reinforcement learning - a direction with strong potential but limited theoretical grounding. Our study centers on how to learn and apply value envelopes…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-23 Sebastian Reboul , Hélène Halconruy , Randal Douc

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

Model-based offline reinforcement learning trains policies using pre-collected datasets and learned environment models, eliminating the need for direct real-world environment interaction. However, this paradigm is inherently challenged by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Wang Luo , Haoran Li , Zicheng Zhang , Congying Han , Chi Zhou , Jiayu Lv , Tiande Guo

Diffusion models are powerful generative models that allow for precise control over the characteristics of the generated samples. While these diffusion models trained on large datasets have achieved success, there is often a need to…

Model-based reinforcement learning is an effective approach for controlling an unknown system. It is based on a longstanding pipeline familiar to the control community in which one performs experiments on the environment to collect a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-08-14 Bruce D. Lee , Ingvar Ziemann , George J. Pappas , Nikolai Matni

In this paper, we propose a novel method for learning reward functions directly from offline demonstrations. Unlike traditional inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), our approach decouples the reward function from the learner's policy,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Seyed Mahdi B. Azad , Zahra Padar , Gabriel Kalweit , Joschka Boedecker

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers a powerful paradigm for data-driven control. Compared to model-free approaches, offline model-based RL (MBRL) explicitly learns a world model from a static dataset and uses it as a surrogate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jiayu Chen , Le Xu , Aravind Venugopal , Jeff Schneider

Offline reinforcement learning can enable policy learning from pre-collected, sub-optimal datasets without online interactions. This makes it ideal for real-world robots and safety-critical scenarios, where collecting online data or expert…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Sreyas Venkataraman , Yufei Wang , Ziyu Wang , Navin Sriram Ravie , Zackory Erickson , David Held