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We propose a new computational-level objective function for theoretical biology and theoretical neuroscience that combines: reinforcement learning, the study of learning with feedback via rewards; rate-distortion theory, a branch of…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-03-21 Sarah Marzen

Reinforcement Learning (RL) in various decision-making tasks of machine learning provides effective results with an agent learning from a stand-alone reward function. However, it presents unique challenges with large amounts of environment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-10 Neda Navidi

Generalization in Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn an agent during training that generalizes to the target environment. This paper studies RL generalization from a theoretical aspect: how much can we expect pre-training over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-30 Haotian Ye , Xiaoyu Chen , Liwei Wang , Simon S. Du

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents often struggle to generalize to new tasks and contexts without updating their parameters, mainly because their learned representations and policies are overfit to the specifics of their training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Fernando Martinez-Lopez , Tao Li , Yingdong Lu , Juntao Chen

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables learning control policies by utilizing only prior experience, without any online interaction. This can allow robots to acquire generalizable skills from large and diverse datasets, without any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-24 Aviral Kumar , Anikait Singh , Stephen Tian , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Offline reinforcement learning seeks to utilize offline (observational) data to guide the learning of (causal) sequential decision making strategies. The hope is that offline reinforcement learning coupled with function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Ruosong Wang , Dean P. Foster , Sham M. Kakade

We study a class of reinforcement learning (RL) tasks where the objective of the agent is to accomplish temporally extended goals. In this setting, a common approach is to represent the tasks as deterministic finite automata (DFA) and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Yash Paliwal , Rajarshi Roy , Jean-Raphaël Gaglione , Nasim Baharisangari , Daniel Neider , Xiaoming Duan , Ufuk Topcu , Zhe Xu

Reinforcement learning (RL) relies heavily on exploration to learn from its environment and maximize observed rewards. Therefore, it is essential to design a reward function that guarantees optimal learning from the received experience.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Ingy ElSayed-Aly , Lu Feng

Single-task RL agents are typically trained under a fixed reward function, which limits their robustness to reward misspecification and their ability to adapt to changing preferences. We introduce Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan , Pieter Abbeel

Reinforcement learning (RL) in the real world necessitates the development of procedures that enable agents to explore without causing harm to themselves or others. The most successful solutions to the problem of safe RL leverage offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Alexander Quessy , Thomas Richardson , Sebastian East

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) concerns the problem of training an agent to maximize the probability of reaching target goal states. This paper presents an analysis of the goal-conditioned setting based on optimal control. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Nathan P. Lawrence , Ali Mesbah

Causal questions inquire about causal relationships between different events or phenomena. They are important for a variety of use cases, including virtual assistants and search engines. However, many current approaches to causal question…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Lukas Blübaum , Stefan Heindorf

Reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world safety-critical target settings like urban driving is hazardous, imperiling the RL agent, other agents, and the environment. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a "safety-critical adaptation"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Jesse Zhang , Brian Cheung , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine , Dinesh Jayaraman

The paradigm of decision-making has been revolutionised by reinforcement learning and deep learning. Although this has led to significant progress in domains such as robotics, healthcare, and finance, the use of RL in practice is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Daqian Shao

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in real-world decision-making across diverse domains, including gaming, robotics, online advertising, public health, and natural language processing. Despite these advances, a…

Applications · Statistics 2026-01-23 Asim H. Gazi , Yongyi Guo , Daiqi Gao , Ziping Xu , Kelly W. Zhang , Susan A. Murphy

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a potent tool for sequential decision-making and has achieved performance surpassing human capabilities across many challenging real-world tasks. As the extension of RL in the multi-agent system domain,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Ruiqi Zhang , Jing Hou , Florian Walter , Shangding Gu , Jiayi Guan , Florian Röhrbein , Yali Du , Panpan Cai , Guang Chen , Alois Knoll

To achieve general artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning (RL) agents should learn not only to optimize returns for one specific task but also to constantly build more complex skills and scaffold their knowledge about the world,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-12-07 Khimya Khetarpal , Shagun Sodhani , Sarath Chandar , Doina Precup

Inferring the abstract relational and causal structure of the world is a major challenge for reinforcement-learning (RL) agents. For humans, language--particularly in the form of explanations--plays a considerable role in overcoming this…

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

In the context of visual navigation, the capacity to map a novel environment is necessary for an agent to exploit its observation history in the considered place and efficiently reach known goals. This ability can be associated with spatial…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-04-26 Pierre Marza , Laetitia Matignon , Olivier Simonin , Christian Wolf