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Related papers: Demonstration-Regularized RL

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Behavior cloning has shown success in many sequential decision-making tasks by learning from expert demonstrations, yet they can be very sample inefficient and fail to generalize to unseen scenarios. One approach to these problems is to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Feiyu Zhu , Jean Oh , Reid Simmons

We provide a theoretical framework for Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). Our analysis shows that when the true reward function is linear, the widely used maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) converges under both the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-09 Banghua Zhu , Jiantao Jiao , Michael I. Jordan

Although reinforcement learning has seen tremendous success recently, this kind of trial-and-error learning can be impractical or inefficient in complex environments. The use of demonstrations, on the other hand, enables agents to benefit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-29 Tongzhou Mu , Hao Su

Learning complex policies with Reinforcement Learning (RL) is often hindered by instability and slow convergence, a problem exacerbated by the difficulty of reward engineering. Imitation Learning (IL) from expert demonstrations bypasses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Sayambhu Sen , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Imitation learning methods seek to learn from an expert either through behavioral cloning (BC) of the policy or inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) of the reward. Such methods enable agents to learn complex tasks from humans that are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-07 Joe Watson , Sandy H. Huang , Nicolas Heess

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

The development of robotic systems for palletization in logistics scenarios is of paramount importance, addressing critical efficiency and precision demands in supply chain management. This paper investigates the application of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Zheng Wu , Yichuan Li , Wei Zhan , Changliu Liu , Yun-Hui Liu , Masayoshi Tomizuka

State entropy regularization has empirically shown better exploration and sample complexity in reinforcement learning (RL). However, its theoretical guarantees have not been studied. In this paper, we show that state entropy regularization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Yonatan Ashlag , Uri Koren , Mirco Mutti , Esther Derman , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Shie Mannor

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) to reason often relies on Reinforcement Learning (RL) with task-specific verifiers. However, many real-world reasoning-intensive tasks lack verifiers, despite offering abundant expert demonstrations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Locke Cai , Ivan Provilkov

It is commonly believed that optimizing the reverse KL divergence results in "mode seeking", while optimizing forward KL results in "mass covering", with the latter being preferred if the goal is to sample from multiple diverse modes. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Anthony GX-Chen , Jatin Prakash , Jeff Guo , Rob Fergus , Rajesh Ranganath

Vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach to solve control tasks involving images as the main observation. State-of-the-art RL algorithms still struggle in terms of sample efficiency, especially when using image…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-05 Elie Aljalbout , Maximilian Ulmer , Rudolph Triebel

Behavioral cloning is a simple yet effective technique for learning sequential decision-making from demonstrations. Recently, it has gained prominence as the core of foundation models for the physical world, where achieving generalization…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Ev Zisselman , Mirco Mutti , Shelly Francis-Meretzki , Elisei Shafer , Aviv Tamar

We propose a general and model-free approach for Reinforcement Learning (RL) on real robotics with sparse rewards. We build upon the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm to use demonstrations. Both demonstrations and actual…

Replication of experimental results has been a challenge faced by many scientific disciplines, including the field of machine learning. Recent work on the theory of machine learning has formalized replicability as the demand that an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Eric Eaton , Marcel Hussing , Michael Kearns , Aaron Roth , Sikata Bela Sengupta , Jessica Sorrell

Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has been receiving increasingly more attention thanks to its encouraging performance on a variety of control tasks. Yet, conventional regularization techniques in training neural networks (e.g., $L_2$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Zhuang Liu , Xuanlin Li , Bingyi Kang , Trevor Darrell

It is known that reinforcement learning (RL) is data-hungry. To improve sample-efficiency of RL, it has been proposed that the learning algorithm utilize data from 'approximately similar' processes. However, since the process models are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Vinay Kanakeri , Shivam Bajaj , Ashwin Verma , Vijay Gupta , Aritra Mitra

Vision-Language-Action Models (VLAs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization capabilities in real-world experiments. However, their success rates are often not on par with expert policies, and they require fine-tuning when the setup…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Tobias Jülg , Wolfram Burgard , Florian Walter

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated its potential to learn complex robotic manipulation tasks. However, RL still requires the robot to collect a large amount of real-world experience. To address this…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-03-12 Bohan Wu , Feng Xu , Zhanpeng He , Abhi Gupta , Peter K. Allen

Recent advances in behavior cloning (BC) have enabled impressive visuomotor control policies. However, these approaches are limited by the quality of human demonstrations, the manual effort required for data collection, and the diminishing…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Lars Ankile , Zhenyu Jiang , Rocky Duan , Guanya Shi , Pieter Abbeel , Anusha Nagabandi

Entropic regularization of policies in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a commonly used heuristic to ensure that the learned policy explores the state-space sufficiently before overfitting to a local optimal policy. The primary motivation for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Hisham Husain , Kamil Ciosek , Ryota Tomioka