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In Reinforcement Learning, the trade-off between exploration and exploitation poses a complex challenge for achieving efficient learning from limited samples. While recent works have been effective in leveraging past experiences for policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Nico Messikommer , Yunlong Song , Davide Scaramuzza

We present a new model-based algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) which consists of explicit exploration and exploitation phases, and is applicable in large or infinite state spaces. The algorithm maintains a set of dynamics models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Mikael Henaff

A key approach to state abstraction is approximating behavioral metrics (notably, bisimulation metrics) in the observation space and embedding these learned distances in the representation space. While promising for robustness to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Ziyan Luo , Tianwei Ni , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Doina Precup , Xujie Si

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents have shown remarkable performances in various environments, where they can discover effective policies directly from sensory inputs. However, these agents often exploit spurious correlations in the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-11 Elisabeth Dillies , Quentin Delfosse , Jannis Blüml , Raban Emunds , Florian Peter Busch , Kristian Kersting

Developing an agent in reinforcement learning (RL) that is capable of performing complex control tasks directly from high-dimensional observation such as raw pixels is yet a challenge as efforts are made towards improving sample efficiency…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-13 Thanh Nguyen , Tung M. Luu , Thang Vu , Chang D. Yoo

One of the significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) when dealing with noise is estimating latent states from observations. Causality provides rigorous theoretical support for ensuring that the underlying states can be uniquely…

Why do reinforcement learning (RL) policies fail or succeed? This is a challenging question due to the complex, high-dimensional nature of agent-environment interactions. In this work, we take a causal perspective on explaining the behavior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-22 Armin Kekić , Jan Schneider , Dieter Büchler , Bernhard Schölkopf , Michel Besserve

We present CREST, an approach for causal reasoning in simulation to learn the relevant state space for a robot manipulation policy. Our approach conducts interventions using internal models, which are simulations with approximate dynamics…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Tabitha Edith Lee , Jialiang Zhao , Amrita S. Sawhney , Siddharth Girdhar , Oliver Kroemer

We consider a Reinforcement Learning setup where an agent interacts with an environment in observation-reward-action cycles without any (esp.\ MDP) assumptions on the environment. State aggregation and more generally feature reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-07-15 Marcus Hutter

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising methodology for training robot controllers. However, most results have been limited to simulation due to the need for a large number of samples and the lack of automated-yet-safe data…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-03-29 Kendall Lowrey , Svetoslav Kolev , Jeremy Dao , Aravind Rajeswaran , Emanuel Todorov

The combinatorial explosion that plagues planning and reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can be moderated using state abstraction. Prohibitively large task representations can be condensed such that essential information is preserved,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-17 David Abel , D. Ellis Hershkowitz , Michael L. Littman

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is appealing because (i) it enables planning and thus more strategic exploration, and (ii) by decoupling dynamics from rewards, it enables fast transfer to new reward functions. However, learning an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-14 Evan Zheran Liu , Ramtin Keramati , Sudarshan Seshadri , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Emma Brunskill , Percy Liang

While reinforcement learning has achieved considerable successes in recent years, state-of-the-art models are often still limited by the size of state and action spaces. Model-free reinforcement learning approaches use some form of state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-23 Paul J. Pritz , Liang Ma , Kin K. Leung

Autonomous robots require high degrees of cognitive and motoric intelligence to come into our everyday life. In non-structured environments and in the presence of uncertainties, such degrees of intelligence are not easy to obtain.…

Teams of people coordinate to perform complex tasks by forming abstract mental models of world and agent dynamics. The use of abstract models contrasts with much recent work in robot learning that uses a high-fidelity simulator and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Adam Labiosa , Josiah P. Hanna

The success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the ability to learn robust representations from the observations of the environment. In most cases, the representations learned purely by the reinforcement learning loss can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Somjit Nath , Rushiv Arora , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

We study how representation learning can accelerate reinforcement learning from rich observations, such as images, without relying either on domain knowledge or pixel-reconstruction. Our goal is to learn representations that both provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-08 Amy Zhang , Rowan McAllister , Roberto Calandra , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

Off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms promise to be applicable in settings where only a fixed data-set (batch) of environment interactions is available and no new experience can be acquired. This property makes these algorithms…

Neural networks are hypothesized to implement interpretable causal mechanisms, yet verifying this requires finding a causal abstraction -- a simpler, high-level Structural Causal Model (SCM) faithful to the network under interventions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Amir Asiaee

Deep reinforcement learning has made significant strides in various robotic tasks. However, employing deep reinforcement learning methods to tackle multi-stage tasks still a challenge. Reinforcement learning algorithms often encounter…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Jiechao Deng , Ning Tan