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Reinforcement learning (RL) agents with pre-specified reward functions cannot provide guaranteed safety across variety of circumstances that an uncertain system might encounter. To guarantee performance while assuring satisfaction of safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Aquib Mustafa , Majid Mazouchi , Subramanya Nageshrao , Hamidreza Modares

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has become a powerful tool for complex decision-making in machine learning and AI. However, traditional methods often assume perfect action execution, overlooking the uncertainties and deviations between an…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Oren Fivel , Matan Rudman , Kobi Cohen

Learning tabula rasa, that is without any prior knowledge, is the prevalent workflow in reinforcement learning (RL) research. However, RL systems, when applied to large-scale settings, rarely operate tabula rasa. Such large-scale systems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-05 Rishabh Agarwal , Max Schwarzer , Pablo Samuel Castro , Aaron Courville , Marc G. Bellemare

Meta-Reinforcement Learning (MRL) is a promising framework for training agents that can quickly adapt to new environments and tasks. In this work, we study the MRL problem under the policy gradient formulation, where we propose a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Mohammad Taha Toghani , Sebastian Perez-Salazar , César A. Uribe

Reinforcement Learning (RL) enables an intelligent agent to optimise its performance in a task by continuously taking action from an observed state and receiving a feedback from the environment in form of rewards. RL typically uses tables…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Alberto Castagna

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a technique to learn the control policy for an agent that interacts with a stochastic environment. In any given state, the agent takes some action, and the environment determines the probability distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Gaurav Gupta , Chenzhong Yin , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh , Paul Bogdan

Preference-Based reinforcement learning (PBRL) learns directly from the preferences of human teachers regarding agent behaviors without needing meticulously designed reward functions. However, existing PBRL methods often learn primarily…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Ziang Liu , Junjie Xu , Xingjiao Wu , Jing Yang , Liang He

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is more sample efficient than model-free RL by using imaginary trajectories generated by the learned dynamics model. When the model is inaccurate or biased, imaginary trajectories may be deleterious…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-12 Wenzhen Huang , Qiyue Yin , Junge Zhang , Kaiqi Huang

Financial markets are influenced by human behavior that deviates from rationality due to cognitive biases. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) models for financial decision-making assume rational agents, potentially overlooking the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Liu He

We study human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (RL) with trajectory preferences, where instead of receiving a numeric reward at each step, the agent only receives preferences over trajectory pairs from a human overseer. The goal of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Xiaoyu Chen , Han Zhong , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Liwei Wang

Pretrained imitation policies have become a strong foundation for robot manipulation, but they often require online improvement to overcome execution errors, limited dataset coverage, and deployment mismatch. A central question is therefore…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Dongjie Yu , Kun Lei , Zhennan Jiang , Jia Pan , Huazhe Xu

Sample efficiency has been a key issue in reinforcement learning (RL). An efficient agent must be able to leverage its prior experiences to quickly adapt to similar, but new tasks and situations. Meta-RL is one attempt at formalizing and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-02 Seyed Roozbeh Razavi Rohani , Saeed Hedayatian , Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah

Reinforcement learning (RL) is gaining attention by more and more researchers in quantitative finance as the agent-environment interaction framework is aligned with decision making process in many business problems. Most of the current…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2022-05-31 Huifang Huang , Ting Gao , Yi Gui , Jin Guo , Peng Zhang

Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) is a technique used in reinforcement learning (RL) that has proven to be very efficient for training off-policy RL-based agents to solve goal-based robotic manipulation tasks using sparse rewards. Even…

Intelligent agents should have the ability to leverage knowledge from previously learned tasks in order to learn new ones quickly and efficiently. Meta-learning approaches have emerged as a popular solution to achieve this. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Zhao Mandi , Pieter Abbeel , Stephen James

We study the use of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) as a tool for the recognition of agents' behavior on the basis of observation of their sequential decision behavior interacting with the environment. We model the problem faced by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-03-22 Qifeng Qiao , Peter A. Beling

Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) offers a promising direction for sample efficient learning, often achieving state of the art results for continuous control tasks. However, many existing MBRL methods rely on combining greedy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Philip Ball , Jack Parker-Holder , Aldo Pacchiano , Krzysztof Choromanski , Stephen Roberts

Time-inconsistent preferences, where agents favor smaller-sooner over larger-later rewards, are a key feature of human and animal decision-making. Quasi-Hyperbolic (QH) discounting provides a simple yet powerful model for this behavior, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 S. R. Eshwar

Building a search relevance model that achieves both low latency and high performance is a long-standing challenge in the search industry. To satisfy the millisecond-level response requirements of online systems while retaining the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Shijie Zhang , Xiang Guo , Rujun Guo , Shaoyu Liu , Xiaozhao Wang , Guanjun Jiang , Kevin Zhang

In recent years, $Q$-learning has become indispensable for model-free reinforcement learning (MFRL). However, it suffers from well-known problems such as under- and overestimation bias of the value, which may adversely affect the policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Youngmin Oh , Jinwoo Shin , Eunho Yang , Sung Ju Hwang