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Deep reinforcement learning (RL) can acquire complex behaviors from low-level inputs, such as images. However, real-world applications of such methods require generalizing to the vast variability of the real world. Deep networks are known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-13 Chelsea Finn , Tianhe Yu , Justin Fu , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) under general non-linear function approximation, and establish sample efficiency and hardness results under various standard structural assumptions. On the positive side, we propose the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Jinglin Chen , Aditya Modi , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Nan Jiang , Alekh Agarwal

Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Aviral Kumar , Xue Bin Peng , Sergey Levine

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Yuxiao Qu , Amrith Setlur , Virginia Smith , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Aviral Kumar

As reinforcement learning (RL) achieves more success in solving complex tasks, more care is needed to ensure that RL research is reproducible and that algorithms herein can be compared easily and fairly with minimal bias. RL results are,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-12 Nicolai A. Lynnerup , Laura Nolling , Rasmus Hasle , John Hallam

Reinforcement Learning (RL) serves as a versatile framework for sequential decision-making, finding applications across diverse domains such as robotics, autonomous driving, recommendation systems, supply chain optimization, biology,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-26 Vaneet Aggarwal , Washim Uddin Mondal , Qinbo Bai

A significant challenge for the practical application of reinforcement learning in the real world is the need to specify an oracle reward function that correctly defines a task. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to avoid this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-16 Kelvin Xu , Ellis Ratner , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

Reinforcement learning (RL) combines a control problem with statistical estimation: The system dynamics are not known to the agent, but can be learned through experience. A recent line of research casts `RL as inference' and suggests a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-05 Brendan O'Donoghue , Ian Osband , Catalin Ionescu

This paper targets the efficient construction of a safety shield for decision making in scenarios that incorporate uncertainty. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are prominent models to capture such planning problems. Reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Nils Jansen , Bettina Könighofer , Sebastian Junges , Alexandru C. Serban , Roderick Bloem

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

Combinatorial optimisation problems framed as mixed integer linear programmes (MILPs) are ubiquitous across a range of real-world applications. The canonical branch-and-bound algorithm seeks to exactly solve MILPs by constructing a search…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Christopher W. F. Parsonson , Alexandre Laterre , Thomas D. Barrett

Sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) can model a wide range of highly complex tasks. Solving sparse-reward tasks is RL's core premise, requiring efficient exploration coupled with long-horizon credit assignment, and overcoming these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Leander Diaz-Bone , Marco Bagatella , Jonas Hübotter , Andreas Krause

Exploration has been a crucial part of reinforcement learning, yet several important questions concerning exploration efficiency are still not answered satisfactorily by existing analytical frameworks. These questions include exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-12-06 Liangpeng Zhang , Ke Tang , Xin Yao

Decoding-based regression, which reformulates regression as a sequence generation task, has emerged as a promising paradigm of applying large language models for numerical prediction. However, its progress is hindered by the misalignment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Ming Chen , Sheng Tang , Rong-Xi Tan , Ziniu Li , Jiacheng Chen , Ke Xue , Chao Qian

While learning in an unknown Markov Decision Process (MDP), an agent should trade off exploration to discover new information about the MDP, and exploitation of the current knowledge to maximize the reward. Although the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Evrard Garcelon , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Alessandro Lazaric , Matteo Pirotta

Intrinsic rewards can improve exploration in reinforcement learning, but the exploration process may suffer from instability caused by non-stationary reward shaping and strong dependency on hyperparameters. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Lukas Schäfer , Filippos Christianos , Josiah P. Hanna , Stefano V. Albrecht

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) studies how to leverage environment statistics to learn useful behaviors without the cost of reward engineering. However, a central challenge in unsupervised RL is to extract behaviors that…

Off-dynamics reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment transition dynamics are different, can be formulated as learning in a robust Markov decision process (RMDP) where uncertainties in transition dynamics are imposed.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Yiting He , Zhishuai Liu , Weixin Wang , Pan Xu

Unsupervised visual representation learning offers the opportunity to leverage large corpora of unlabeled trajectories to form useful visual representations, which can benefit the training of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Wancong Zhang , Anthony GX-Chen , Vlad Sobal , Yann LeCun , Nicolas Carion

Efficient exploration is one of the key challenges for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Most traditional sample efficiency bounds require strategic exploration. Recently many deep RL algorithms with simple heuristic exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-19 Yao Liu , Emma Brunskill