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This paper considers the problem of learning safe policies in the context of reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, we consider the notion of probabilistic safety. This is, we aim to design policies that maintain the state of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Weiqin Chen , Dharmashankar Subramanian , Santiago Paternain

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

We consider a problem of learning the reward and policy from expert examples under unknown dynamics. Our proposed method builds on the framework of generative adversarial networks and introduces the empowerment-regularized maximum-entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Ahmed H. Qureshi , Byron Boots , Michael C. Yip

In this paper, we explore using deep reinforcement learning for problems with multiple agents. Most existing methods for deep multi-agent reinforcement learning consider only a small number of agents. When the number of agents increases,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-24 Arbaaz Khan , Clark Zhang , Daniel D. Lee , Vijay Kumar , Alejandro Ribeiro

We propose a new family of policy gradient methods for reinforcement learning, which alternate between sampling data through interaction with the environment, and optimizing a "surrogate" objective function using stochastic gradient ascent.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-29 John Schulman , Filip Wolski , Prafulla Dhariwal , Alec Radford , Oleg Klimov

While Reinforcement Learning can achieve impressive results for complex tasks, the learned policies are generally prone to fail in downstream tasks with even minor model mismatch or unexpected perturbations. Recent works have demonstrated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Kang Xu , Yan Ma , Bingsheng Wei , Wei Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven remarkably effective at improving the accuracy of language models in verifiable and deterministic domains like mathematics. Here, we examine if current RL methods are also effective at optimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Michael Bereket , Jure Leskovec

Programmatic reinforcement learning (PRL) offers an interpretable alternative to deep reinforcement learning by representing policies as human-readable and -editable programs. While gradient-based methods have been developed to optimize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Chengpeng Hu , Yingqian Zhang , Hendrik Baier

Recent developments in offline reinforcement learning have uncovered the immense potential of diffusion modeling, which excels at representing heterogeneous behavior policies. However, sampling from diffusion policies is considerably slow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Huayu Chen , Cheng Lu , Zhengyi Wang , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

We address the problem of learning hierarchical deep neural network policies for reinforcement learning. In contrast to methods that explicitly restrict or cripple lower layers of a hierarchy to force them to use higher-level modulating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-05 Tuomas Haarnoja , Kristian Hartikainen , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Regularization of control policies using entropy can be instrumental in adjusting predictability of real-world systems. Applications benefiting from such approaches range from, e.g., cybersecurity, which aims at maximal unpredictability, to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-18 Menno van Zutphen , Giannis Delimpaltadakis , Maurice Heemels , Duarte Antunes

Policy gradient methods have achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning problems. However, it still often suffers from the large variance issue on policy gradient estimation, which leads to poor sample…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-26 Hao Liu , Yihao Feng , Yi Mao , Dengyong Zhou , Jian Peng , Qiang Liu

Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) is a popular and empirically successful policy search algorithm in reinforcement learning (RL). It iteratively solved the surrogate problem which restricts consecutive policies to be close to each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Sahar Roostaie , Mohammad Mehdi Ebadzadeh

Numerous online services are data-driven: the behavior of users affects the system's parameters, and the system's parameters affect the users' experience of the service, which in turn affects the way users may interact with the system. For…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Sarah Dean , Mihaela Curmei , Lillian J. Ratliff , Jamie Morgenstern , Maryam Fazel

Score-function based methods for policy learning, such as REINFORCE and PPO, have delivered strong results in game-playing and robotics, yet their high variance often undermines training stability. Using pathwise policy gradients, i.e.…

This paper introduces two novel modifications to the Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO) algorithm [1], approached from a mixed-policy perspective. Standard policy gradient methods can suffer from instability and sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Hongze Tan , Yuchen Li

Policy networks are a central feature of deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for continuous control, enabling the estimation and sampling of high-value actions. From the variational inference perspective on RL, policy networks, when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Joseph Marino , Alexandre Piché , Alessandro Davide Ialongo , Yisong Yue

Despite the growing prevalence of artificial neural networks in real-world applications, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks remains a significant concern, which motivates us to investigate the robustness of machine learning models.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Jie Wang , Rui Gao , Yao Xie

Agents trained via deep reinforcement learning (RL) routinely fail to generalize to unseen environments, even when these share the same underlying dynamics as the training levels. Understanding the generalization properties of RL is one of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Martin Bertran , Natalia Martinez , Mariano Phielipp , Guillermo Sapiro

Among the great successes of Reinforcement Learning (RL), self-play algorithms play an essential role in solving competitive games. Current self-play algorithms optimize the agent to maximize expected win-rates against its current or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Yuhua Jiang , Qihan Liu , Xiaoteng Ma , Chenghao Li , Yiqin Yang , Jun Yang , Bin Liang , Qianchuan Zhao