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Mobile robots are increasingly being employed for performing complex tasks in dynamic environments. Reinforcement learning (RL) methods are recognized to be promising for specifying such tasks in a relatively simple manner. However, the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Angel Martínez-Tenor , Juan Antonio Fernández-Madrigal , Ana Cruz-Martín , Javier González-Jiménez

As a paradigm for sequential decision making in unknown environments, reinforcement learning (RL) has received a flurry of attention in recent years. However, the explosion of model complexity in emerging applications and the presence of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-22 Yuejie Chi , Yuxin Chen , Yuting Wei

Off-policy reinforcement learning aims to leverage experience collected from prior policies for sample-efficient learning. However, in practice, commonly used off-policy approximate dynamic programming methods based on Q-learning and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Aviral Kumar , Justin Fu , George Tucker , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training LLM-based agents, yet remains limited by low sample efficiency, stemming not only from sparse outcome feedback but also from the agent's inability to leverage prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Dilxat Muhtar , Jiashun Liu , Wei Gao , Weixun Wang , Shaopan Xiong , Ju Huang , Siran Yang , Wenbo Su , Jiamang Wang , Ling Pan , Bo Zheng

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of inferring the reward function of an agent, given its policy or observed behavior. Analogous to RL, IRL is perceived both as a problem and as a class of methods. By categorically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Saurabh Arora , Prashant Doshi

Inverse reinforcement learning aims to infer the reward function that explains expert behavior observed through trajectories of state--action pairs. A long-standing difficulty in classical IRL is the non-uniqueness of the recovered reward:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-09 Denis Belomestny , Alexey Naumov , Sergey Samsonov

We prove performance guarantees of two algorithms for approximating $Q^\star$ in batch reinforcement learning. Compared to classical iterative methods such as Fitted Q-Iteration---whose performance loss incurs quadratic dependence on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Tengyang Xie , Nan Jiang

Recently, there has been a surge in interest in safe and robust techniques within reinforcement learning (RL). Current notions of risk in RL fail to capture the potential for systemic failures such as abrupt stoppages from system failures…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-10-09 David Mguni

We propose a new bootstrap-based online algorithm for stochastic linear bandit problems. The key idea is to adopt residual bootstrap exploration, in which the agent estimates the next step reward by re-sampling the residuals of mean reward…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-20 Shuang Wu , Chi-Hua Wang , Yuantong Li , Guang Cheng

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) promises the ability to learn effective policies solely using existing, static datasets, without any costly online interaction. To do so, offline RL methods must handle distributional shift between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Joey Hong , Aviral Kumar , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have been proven successful in solving manipulation tasks autonomously. However, RL is still not widely adopted on real robotic systems because working with real hardware entails additional challenges,…

Pessimism is of great importance in offline reinforcement learning (RL). One broad category of offline RL algorithms fulfills pessimism by explicit or implicit behavior regularization. However, most of them only consider policy divergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Chen Chen , Hongyao Tang , Yi Ma , Chao Wang , Qianli Shen , Dong Li , Jianye Hao

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is more sample efficient than model-free RL by using imaginary trajectories generated by the learned dynamics model. When the model is inaccurate or biased, imaginary trajectories may be deleterious…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-12 Wenzhen Huang , Qiyue Yin , Junge Zhang , Kaiqi Huang

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is considered to be a promising approach to reduce the sample complexity that hinders model-free RL. However, the theoretical understanding of such methods has been rather limited. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yuping Luo , Huazhe Xu , Yuanzhi Li , Yuandong Tian , Trevor Darrell , Tengyu Ma

Reinforcement learning (RL) has a rich history in neuroscience, from early work on dopamine as a reward prediction error signal (Schultz et al., 1997) to recent work proposing that the brain could implement a form of 'distributional…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2024-12-19 Kristopher T. Jensen

In many real-world settings, reinforcement learning systems suffer performance degradation when the environment encountered at deployment differs from that observed during training. Distributionally robust reinforcement learning (DR-RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Debamita Ghosh , George K. Atia , Yue Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great promise with algorithms learning in environments with large state and action spaces purely from scalar reward signals. A crucial challenge for current deep RL algorithms is that they require a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Shivakanth Sujit , Pedro H. M. Braga , Jorg Bornschein , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Motivated by the success of ensembles for uncertainty estimation in supervised learning, we take a renewed look at how ensembles of $Q$-functions can be leveraged as the primary source of pessimism for offline reinforcement learning (RL).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-30 Seyed Kamyar Seyed Ghasemipour , Shixiang Shane Gu , Ofir Nachum

Recent advancements in Large Language Models have yielded significant improvements in complex reasoning tasks such as mathematics and programming. However, these models remain heavily dependent on annotated data and exhibit limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Jia Liu , ChangYi He , YingQiao Lin , MingMin Yang , FeiYang Shen , ShaoGuo Liu