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Classical reinforcement learning (RL) techniques are generally concerned with the design of decision-making policies driven by the maximisation of the expected outcome. Nevertheless, this approach does not take into consideration the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-02 Thibaut Théate , Damien Ernst

Transfer learning across different reinforcement learning (RL) tasks is becoming an increasingly valuable area of research. We consider a goal-based multi-task RL framework and mechanisms by which previously solved tasks can reduce sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-02 Nick Denis

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) suffers from sparse outcome signals, creating severe exploration bottlenecks on complex reasoning tasks. Recent on-policy self-distillation methods attempt to address this by utilizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Yang Li , Erik Nijkamp , Semih Yavuz , Shafiq Joty

Reward shaping is an effective technique for incorporating domain knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as potential-based reward shaping normally make full use of a given shaping reward function. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-06 Yujing Hu , Weixun Wang , Hangtian Jia , Yixiang Wang , Yingfeng Chen , Jianye Hao , Feng Wu , Changjie Fan

Preference-based learning of reward functions, where the reward function is learned using comparison data, has been well studied for complex robotic tasks such as autonomous driving. Existing algorithms have focused on learning reward…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-05 Sydney M. Katz , Amir Maleki , Erdem Bıyık , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Predicting distant future trajectories of agents in a dynamic scene is not an easy problem because the future trajectory of an agent is affected by not only his/her past trajectory but also the scene contexts. To tackle this problem, we…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-03-11 Dooseop Choi , Kyoungwook Min , Jeongdan Choi

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms combined with value function approximation have recently achieved impressive performance in a variety of application domains. However, the theoretical understanding of such algorithms is limited,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Botao Hao , Nevena Lazic , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Pooria Joulani , Csaba Szepesvari

Function regression/approximation is a fundamental application of machine learning. Neural networks (NNs) can be easily trained for function regression using a sufficient number of neurons and epochs. The forward-forward learning algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Shivam Padmani , Akshay Joshi

In the physical world, people have dynamic preferences, e.g., the same situation can lead to satisfaction for some humans and to frustration for others. Personalization is called for. The same observation holds for online behavior with…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2017-08-16 Ziming Li , Julia Kiseleva , Maarten de Rijke , Artem Grotov

Multi-task representation learning (MTRL) is an approach that learns shared latent representations across related tasks, facilitating collaborative learning that improves the overall learning efficiency. This paper studies MTRL for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yaoze Guo , Shana Moothedath

In many real-world applications, the reward function is too complex to be manually specified. In such cases, reward functions must instead be learned from human feedback. Since the learned reward may fail to represent user preferences, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-28 Erik Jenner , Adam Gleave

As discussed in previous studies, the efficacy of evolutionary or reinforcement learning algorithms for continuous control optimization can be enhanced by including a neural module dedicated to feature extraction trained through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Nicola Milano , Stefano Nolfi

The famous Policy Iteration algorithm alternates between policy improvement and policy evaluation. Implementations of this algorithm with several variants of the latter evaluation stage, e.g, $n$-step and trace-based returns, have been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-08-01 Yonathan Efroni , Gal Dalal , Bruno Scherrer , Shie Mannor

We consider evaluating and training a new policy for the evaluation data by using the historical data obtained from a different policy. The goal of off-policy evaluation (OPE) is to estimate the expected reward of a new policy over the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-19 Masahiro Kato , Masatoshi Uehara , Shota Yasui

In the traditional view of reinforcement learning, the agent's goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes its expected sum of rewards. Once the agent finds this policy, the learning ends. This view contrasts with \emph{continual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Esraa Elelimy , David Szepesvari , Martha White , Michael Bowling

The use of past experiences to accelerate temporal difference (TD) learning of value functions, or experience replay, is a key component in deep reinforcement learning. Prioritization or reweighting of important experiences has shown to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Samarth Sinha , Jiaming Song , Animesh Garg , Stefano Ermon

The policy gradients of the expected return objective can react slowly to rare rewards. Yet, in some cases agents may wish to emphasize the low or high returns regardless of their probability. Borrowing from the economics and control…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-20 Chris J. Maddison , Dieterich Lawson , George Tucker , Nicolas Heess , Arnaud Doucet , Andriy Mnih , Yee Whye Teh

In reinforcement learning, different reward functions can be equivalent in terms of the optimal policies they induce. A particularly well-known and important example is potential shaping, a class of functions that can be added to any reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Erik Jenner , Herke van Hoof , Adam Gleave

Continual learning is a promising machine learning paradigm to learn new tasks while retaining previously learned knowledge over streaming training data. Till now, rehearsal-based methods, keeping a small part of data from old tasks as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-04 Quanziang Wang , Renzhen Wang , Yuexiang Li , Dong Wei , Kai Ma , Yefeng Zheng , Deyu Meng

Stemming on the idea that a key objective in reinforcement learning is to invert a target distribution of effects, end-effect drives are proposed as an effective way to implement goal-directed motor learning, in the absence of an explicit…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Emmanuel Daucé