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Related papers: Fractal Landscapes in Policy Optimization

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Reinforcement learning fine-tuning (RLFT) is a dominant paradigm for improving pretrained policies for downstream tasks. These pretrained policies, trained on large datasets, produce generations with a broad range of promising but unrefined…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Jubayer Ibn Hamid , Ifdita Hasan Orney , Ellen Xu , Chelsea Finn , Dorsa Sadigh

Reinforcement Learning is a powerful framework for training agents to navigate different situations, but it is susceptible to changes in environmental dynamics. However, solving Markov Decision Processes that are robust to changes is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Etash Kumar Guha

The problem of how to take the right actions to make profits in sequential process continues to be difficult due to the quick dynamics and a significant amount of uncertainty in many application scenarios. In such complicated environments,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Zhendong Shi , Xiaoli Wei , Ercan E. Kuruoglu

Policy gradient methods have been frequently applied to problems in control and reinforcement learning with great success, yet existing convergence analysis still relies on non-intuitive, impractical and often opaque conditions. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-08 Matthew S. Zhang , Murat A. Erdogdu , Animesh Garg

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have proven transformative in a range of domains. To tackle real-world domains, these systems often use neural networks to learn policies directly from pixels or other high-dimensional sensory input.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Nishil Patel , Sebastian Lee , Stefano Sarao Mannelli , Sebastian Goldt , Andrew Saxe

Reinforcement Learning (RL) can effectively learn complex policies. However, learning these policies often demands extensive trial-and-error interactions with the environment. In many real-world scenarios, this approach is not practical due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-19 Linh Le Pham Van , Hung The Tran , Sunil Gupta

Deep reinforcement learning agents achieve state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of simulated control tasks. However, successful applications to real-world problems remain limited. One reason for this dichotomy is because the learnt…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-27 Rory Young , Nicolas Pugeault

Policy gradient methods are extensively used in reinforcement learning as a way to optimize expected return. In this paper, we explore the evolution of the policy parameters, for a special class of exactly solvable POMDPs, as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Gavin McCracken , Colin Daniels , Rosie Zhao , Anna Brandenberger , Prakash Panangaden , Doina Precup

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) breaks through the bottlenecks of traditional reinforcement learning (RL) with the help of the perception capability of deep learning and has been widely applied in real-world problems.While model-free RL,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Tingting Zhao , Ying Wang , Wei Sun , Yarui Chen , Gang Niub , Masashi Sugiyama

Bandit and reinforcement learning (RL) problems can often be framed as optimization problems where the goal is to maximize average performance while having access only to stochastic estimates of the true gradient. Traditionally, stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-22 Wesley Chung , Valentin Thomas , Marlos C. Machado , Nicolas Le Roux

Policy robustness in Reinforcement Learning may not be desirable at any cost: the alterations caused by robustness requirements from otherwise optimal policies should be explainable, quantifiable and formally verifiable. In this work we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Daniel Jarne Ornia , Licio Romao , Lewis Hammond , Manuel Mazo , Alessandro Abate

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated tremendous empirical success across numerous challenging domains. However, we lack a strong theoretical understanding of the statistical complexity of RL in environments with large state spaces,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Gene Li

Deep Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning methods have empirically shown great promise in tackling challenging combinatorial problems. In those methods a deep neural network is used as a solution generator which is then trained by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Constantine Caramanis , Dimitris Fotakis , Alkis Kalavasis , Vasilis Kontonis , Christos Tzamos

We explore reinforcement learning methods for finding the optimal policy in the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem. In particular, we consider the convergence of policy gradient methods in the setting of known and unknown parameters.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Ben Hambly , Renyuan Xu , Huining Yang

Policy gradient methods have shown success in learning control policies for high-dimensional dynamical systems. Their biggest downside is the amount of exploration they require before yielding high-performing policies. In a lifelong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Jorge A. Mendez , Boyu Wang , Eric Eaton

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for maintaining reliable performance in high-stakes applications. While traditional RL methods aim to learn a point estimate of the random cumulative cost, distributional RL (DRL) seeks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Minheng Xiao , Xian Yu , Lei Ying

Standard reinforcement learning methods aim to master one way of solving a task whereas there may exist multiple near-optimal policies. Being able to identify this collection of near-optimal policies can allow a domain expert to efficiently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Muhammad A. Masood , Finale Doshi-Velez

While reinforcement learning methods have delivered remarkable results in a number of settings, generalization, i.e., the ability to produce policies that generalize in a reliable and systematic way, has remained a challenge. The problem of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Simon Ståhlberg , Blai Bonet , Hector Geffner

Designing sample-efficient and computationally feasible reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is particularly challenging in environments with large or infinite state and action spaces. In this paper, we advance this effort by presenting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Zakaria Mhammedi