English
Related papers

Related papers: Why Online Reinforcement Learning is Causal

200 papers

Sequential decision-making agents struggle with long horizon tasks, since solving them requires multi-step reasoning. Most reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms address this challenge by improved credit assignment, introducing memory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Bogdan Mazoure , Jake Bruce , Doina Precup , Rob Fergus , Ankit Anand

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents typically optimize their policies by performing expensive backward passes to update their network parameters. However, some agents can solve new tasks without updating any parameters by simply conditioning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Amir Moeini , Jiuqi Wang , Jacob Beck , Ethan Blaser , Shimon Whiteson , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang

This paper serves to introduce the reader to the field of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) and its intersection with methods from the study of causality. We highlight key challenges in MARL and discuss these in the context of how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-02 St John Grimbly , Jonathan Shock , Arnu Pretorius

Two central paradigms have emerged in the reinforcement learning (RL) community: online RL and offline RL. In the online RL setting, the agent has no prior knowledge of the environment, and must interact with it in order to find an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Andrew Wagenmaker , Aldo Pacchiano

We study offline multitask representation learning in reinforcement learning (RL), where a learner is provided with an offline dataset from different tasks that share a common representation and is asked to learn the shared representation.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Haque Ishfaq , Thanh Nguyen-Tang , Songtao Feng , Raman Arora , Mengdi Wang , Ming Yin , Doina Precup

Reinforcement learning algorithms have had tremendous successes in online learning settings. However, these successes have relied on low-stakes interactions between the algorithmic agent and its environment. In many settings where RL could…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-05 James Bannon , Brad Windsor , Wenbo Song , Tao Li

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm in Artificial Intelligence (AI), enabling agents to learn optimal behaviors through interactions with their environments. Drawing from the foundations of trial and error, RL…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Majid Ghasemi , Amir Hossein Moosavi , Dariush Ebrahimi

Applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems is often made challenging by the inability to interact with the environment and the difficulty of designing reward functions. Offline RL addresses the first challenge by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Alizée Pace , Bernhard Schölkopf , Gunnar Rätsch , Giorgia Ramponi

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Daniel Shin , Anca D. Dragan , Daniel S. Brown

The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-25 Wuxia Chen , Taposh Banerjee , Jemin George , Carl Busart

In Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL), incorporating causal structures into dynamics models provides agents with a structured understanding of the environments, enabling efficient decision. Empowerment as an intrinsic motivation…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Hongye Cao , Fan Feng , Meng Fang , Shaokang Dong , Tianpei Yang , Jing Huo , Yang Gao

Inducing causal relationships from observations is a classic problem in machine learning. Most work in causality starts from the premise that the causal variables themselves are observed. However, for AI agents such as robots trying to make…

Advances in reinforcement learning research have demonstrated the ways in which different agent-based models can learn how to optimally perform a task within a given environment. Reinforcement leaning solves unsupervised problems where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-03 Herkulaas Combrink , Vukosi Marivate , Benjamin Rosman

Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) needs an environment to collect fresh data, which is impractical when online interactions are costly. Offline RL provides an alternative solution by directly learning from the previously collected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Han Zheng , Xufang Luo , Pengfei Wei , Xuan Song , Dongsheng Li , Jing Jiang

In typical reinforcement learning (RL), the environment is assumed given and the goal of the learning is to identify an optimal policy for the agent taking actions through its interactions with the environment. In this paper, we extend this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-10-25 Haifeng Zhang , Jun Wang , Zhiming Zhou , Weinan Zhang , Ying Wen , Yong Yu , Wenxin Li

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) provides a promising avenue for training policies from pre-collected datasets when gathering additional interaction data is infeasible. However, existing offline RL methods often assume stationarity or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Suzan Ece Ada , Georg Martius , Emre Ugur , Erhan Oztop

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents sequentially interact with changing environments while aiming to maximize the obtained rewards. Usually, rewards are observed only after acting, and so the goal is to maximize the expected cumulative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Nadav Merlis , Dorian Baudry , Vianney Perchet

We consider the hybrid reinforcement learning setting where the agent has access to both offline data and online interactive access. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) research typically assumes offline data contains complete action, reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Yuda Song , J. Andrew Bagnell , Aarti Singh

We study a security threat to reinforcement learning where an attacker poisons the learning environment to force the agent into executing a target policy chosen by the attacker. As a victim, we consider RL agents whose objective is to find…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-20 Amin Rakhsha , Goran Radanovic , Rati Devidze , Xiaojin Zhu , Adish Singla

Models and games are simplified representations of the world. There are many different kinds of models, all differing in complexity and which aspect of the world they allow us to further our understanding of. In this paper we focus on a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-07 Joseph Christian G. Noel