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We study episodic reinforcement learning under unknown adversarial corruptions in both the rewards and the transition probabilities of the underlying system. We propose new algorithms which, compared to the existing results in (Lykouris et…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Yifang Chen , Simon S. Du , Kevin Jamieson

Increasingly, recommender systems are tasked with improving users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a bandit problem with delayed rewards. There is an apparent trade-off in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Kelly W. Zhang , Thomas Baldwin-McDonald , Kamil Ciosek , Lucas Maystre , Daniel Russo

Rewards play an essential role in reinforcement learning. In contrast to rule-based game environments with well-defined reward functions, complex real-world robotic applications, such as contact-rich manipulation, lack explicit and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-30 Yuning Wu , Jieliang Luo , Hui Li

Long-term temporal credit assignment is an important challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). It refers to the ability of the agent to attribute actions to consequences that may occur after a long time interval. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Tanmay Gangwani , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng

In many RL applications, once training ends, it is vital to detect any deterioration in the agent performance as soon as possible. Furthermore, it often has to be done without modifying the policy and under minimal assumptions regarding the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-01 Ido Greenberg , Shie Mannor

Any reinforcement learning system must be able to identify which past events contributed to observed outcomes, a problem known as credit assignment. A common solution to this problem is to use an eligibility trace to assign credit to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Duncan Bailey , Marcelo G. Mattar

This paper provides a theoretical and numerical investigation of a penalty decomposition scheme for the solution of optimization problems with geometric constraints. In particular, we consider some situations where parts of the constraints…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-23 Matteo Lapucci , Christian Kanzow

Appropriate credit assignment for delay rewards is a fundamental challenge for reinforcement learning. To tackle this problem, we introduce a delay reward calibration paradigm inspired from a classification perspective. We hypothesize that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-26 Yixuan Liu , Hu Wang , Xiaowei Wang , Xiaoyue Sun , Liuyue Jiang , Minhui Xue

In a broad class of reinforcement learning applications, stochastic rewards have heavy-tailed distributions, which lead to infinite second-order moments for stochastic (semi)gradients in policy evaluation and direct policy optimization. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Semih Cayci , Atilla Eryilmaz

There are many algorithms for regret minimisation in episodic reinforcement learning. This problem is well-understood from a theoretical perspective, providing that the sequences of states, actions and rewards associated with each episode…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-07 Benjamin Howson , Ciara Pike-Burke , Sarah Filippi

We propose a distributional framework for offline Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) that jointly models uncertainty over reward functions and full distributions of returns. Unlike conventional IRL approaches that recover a deterministic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Feiyang Wu , Ye Zhao , Anqi Wu

Explaining the behavior of reinforcement learning agents operating in sequential decision-making settings is challenging, as their behavior is affected by a dynamic environment and delayed rewards. Methods that help users understand the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Yael Septon , Tobias Huber , Elisabeth André , Ofra Amir

Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) has been proved to be a successful reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for continuous control tasks. However, DDPG still suffers from data insufficiency and training inefficiency, especially in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-05 Zhizheng Zhang , Jiale Chen , Zhibo Chen , Weiping Li

Reward shaping is one of the most effective methods to tackle the crucial yet challenging problem of credit assignment in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, designing shaping functions usually requires much expert knowledge and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-29 Haosheng Zou , Tongzheng Ren , Dong Yan , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

Non-parametric episodic memory can be used to quickly latch onto high-rewarded experience in reinforcement learning tasks. In contrast to parametric deep reinforcement learning approaches in which reward signals need to be back-propagated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Zhao Yang , Thomas M. Moerland , Mike Preuss , Aske Plaat

Deep Reinforcement Learning is a promising tool for robotic control, yet practical application is often hindered by the difficulty of designing effective reward functions. Real-world tasks typically require optimizing multiple objectives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Kilian Freitag , Knut Åkesson , Morteza Haghir Chehreghani

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to explicitly infer an underlying reward function based on collected expert demonstrations. Considering that obtaining expert demonstrations can be costly, the focus of current IRL techniques is on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-16 Lu Li , Yuxin Pan , Ruobing Chen , Jie Liu , Zilin Wang , Yu Liu , Zhiheng Li

Robot control using reinforcement learning has become popular, but its learning process generally terminates halfway through an episode for safety and time-saving reasons. This study addresses the problem of the most popular exception…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Taisuke Kobayashi

Reasoning tasks are crucial in many domains, especially in science and engineering. Although large language models (LLMs) have made progress in reasoning tasks using techniques such as chain-of-thought and least-to-most prompting, these…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Sergio Hernández-Gutiérrez , Minttu Alakuijala , Alexander V. Nikitin , Pekka Marttinen

Exploration is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), and its effectiveness is a deciding factor in the performance of RL algorithms, especially when facing sparse extrinsic rewards. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Shanchuan Wan , Yujin Tang , Yingtao Tian , Tomoyuki Kaneko