Related papers: Scalable Online Exploration via Coverability
We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation, where the agent works in two phases: (1) in the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment but cannot access the reward; and (2) in the…
The goal of meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) is to build agents that can quickly learn new tasks by leveraging prior experience on related tasks. Learning a new task often requires both exploring to gather task-relevant information and…
Proximal Policy Optimization with Adaptive Exploration (axPPO) is introduced as a novel learning algorithm. This paper investigates the exploration-exploitation tradeoff within the context of reinforcement learning and aims to contribute…
Sample-efficiency guarantees for offline reinforcement learning (RL) often rely on strong assumptions on both the function classes (e.g., Bellman-completeness) and the data coverage (e.g., all-policy concentrability). Despite the recent…
Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) can be effectively supported at scale through the use of world models. However, in practice, scaling such approaches remains fundamentally limited. A commonly recognized challenge is model bias and…
In some applications of reinforcement learning, a dataset of pre-collected experience is already available but it is also possible to acquire some additional online data to help improve the quality of the policy. However, it may be…
Online on-policy preference learning algorithms for language model alignment such as online direct policy optimization (DPO) can significantly outperform their offline counterparts. We provide a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon…
Sufficient exploration is paramount for the success of a reinforcement learning agent. Yet, exploration is rarely assessed in an algorithm-independent way. We compare the behavior of three data-based, offline exploration metrics described…
In the last few years, the research activity around reinforcement learning tasks formulated over environments with sparse rewards has been especially notable. Among the numerous approaches proposed to deal with these hard exploration…
Engagement-optimized adaptive tutoring systems may prioritize short-term behavioral signals over sustained learning outcomes, creating structural incentives for reward hacking in reinforcement learning policies. We formalize this challenge…
This work provides a novel interpretation of Markov Decision Processes (MDP) from the online optimization viewpoint. In such an online optimization context, the policy of the MDP is viewed as the decision variable while the corresponding…
While reinforcement learning (RL) holds great potential for decision making in the real world, it suffers from a number of unique difficulties which often need specific consideration. In particular: it is highly non-stationary; suffers from…
Solving sparse reward tasks through exploration is one of the major challenges in deep reinforcement learning, especially in three-dimensional, partially-observable environments. Critically, the algorithm proposed in this article uses a…
Exploration in high-dimensional, continuous spaces with sparse rewards is an open problem in reinforcement learning. Artificial curiosity algorithms address this by creating rewards that lead to exploration. Given a reinforcement learning…
In traditional reinforcement learning (RL), the learner aims to solve a single objective optimization problem: find the policy that maximizes expected reward. However, in many real-world settings, it is important to optimize over multiple…
In environments with uncertain dynamics exploration is necessary to learn how to perform well. Existing reinforcement learning algorithms provide strong exploration guarantees, but they tend to rely on an ergodicity assumption. The essence…
Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) leverages both pre-trained offline policies and online policies trained for downstream tasks, aiming to improve data efficiency and accelerate performance enhancement. An existing approach,…
While policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) achieves tremendous successes in practice, it is significantly less understood in theory, especially compared with value-based RL. In particular, it remains elusive how to design a provably…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has improved the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), yet state-of-the-art methods still fail to learn on many training problems. On hard problems, on-policy RL rarely explores even a single…