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We introduce a novel training procedure for policy gradient methods wherein episodic memory is used to optimize the hyperparameters of reinforcement learning algorithms on-the-fly. Unlike other hyperparameter searches, we formulate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Hung Le , Majid Abdolshah , Thommen K. George , Kien Do , Dung Nguyen , Svetha Venkatesh

When deploying artificial agents in real-world environments where they interact with humans, it is crucial that their behavior is aligned with the values, social norms or other requirements of that environment. However, many environments…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Mattijs Baert , Pietro Mazzaglia , Sam Leroux , Pieter Simoens

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn an individual task. While in principle meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms enable agents to learn new skills from small amounts of experience,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-21 Kate Rakelly , Aurick Zhou , Deirdre Quillen , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically assume rewards to be sampled from light-tailed distributions, such as Gaussian or bounded. However, a wide variety of real-world systems generate rewards that follow heavy-tailed distributions. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Vincent Zhuang , Yanan Sui

This paper considers the problem of solving constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems with anytime guarantees, meaning that the algorithmic solution must yield a constraint-satisfying policy at every iteration of its evolution. Our…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-03 Pol Mestres , Arnau Marzabal , Jorge Cortés

Reinforcement learning has shown promise in learning policies that can solve complex problems. However, manually specifying a good reward function can be difficult, especially for intricate tasks. Inverse reinforcement learning offers a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-28 Peter Henderson , Wei-Di Chang , Pierre-Luc Bacon , David Meger , Joelle Pineau , Doina Precup

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) presents distinct challenges as it relies solely on observational data. A central concern in this context is ensuring the safety of the learned policy by quantifying uncertainties associated with various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Xiaocong Chen , Siyu Wang , Tong Yu , Lina Yao

A medical policy aims to support decision-making by mapping patient characteristics to individualized treatment recommendations. Standard approaches typically optimize a single outcome criterion. For example, recommending treatment…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-02 Laura Fuentes-Vicente , Mathieu Even , Gaelle Dormion , Julie Josse , Antoine Chambaz

Gradient-based methods have been widely used for system design and optimization in diverse application domains. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in studying theoretical properties of these methods in the context of control and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-11 Bin Hu , Kaiqing Zhang , Na Li , Mehran Mesbahi , Maryam Fazel , Tamer Başar

We consider the problem of imitation learning from a finite set of expert trajectories, without access to reinforcement signals. The classical approach of extracting the expert's reward function via inverse reinforcement learning, followed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Ruohan Wang , Carlo Ciliberto , Pierluigi Amadori , Yiannis Demiris

We revisit the Reinforce policy gradient algorithm from the literature. Note that this algorithm typically works with cost returns obtained over random length episodes obtained from either termination upon reaching a goal state (as with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Shalabh Bhatnagar

Stock portfolio optimization is the process of constant re-distribution of money to a pool of various stocks. In this paper, we will formulate the problem such that we can apply Reinforcement Learning for the task properly. To maintain a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-14 Le Trung Hieu

Distributed reinforcement learning trains on data from stale, buggy, or mismatched actors, producing actions with high surprisal (negative log-probability) under the learner's policy. The core difficulty is not surprising data per se, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Ian Osband

Several authors have recently developed risk-sensitive policy gradient methods that augment the standard expected cost minimization problem with a measure of variability in cost. These studies have focused on specific risk-measures, such as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-06-09 Aviv Tamar , Yinlam Chow , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Shie Mannor

Identifying uncertainty and taking mitigating actions is crucial for safe and trustworthy reinforcement learning agents, especially when deployed in high-risk environments. In this paper, risk sensitivity is promoted in a model-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Stefan Radic Webster , Peter Flach

In this paper, we consider risk-sensitive sequential decision-making in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Our contributions are two-fold. First, we introduce a novel and coherent quantification of risk, namely composite risk, which quantifies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-30 Hannes Eriksson , Debabrota Basu , Mina Alibeigi , Christos Dimitrakakis

Dynamic hedging is a financial strategy that consists in periodically transacting one or multiple financial assets to offset the risk associated with a correlated liability. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms have been used to…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-04-18 Andrei Neagu , Frédéric Godin , Leila Kosseim

Value-based methods for reinforcement learning lack generally applicable ways to derive behavior from a value function. Many approaches involve approximate value iteration (e.g., $Q$-learning), and acting greedily with respect to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-27 Alan Chan , Kris de Asis , Richard S. Sutton

Inverse reinforcement learning is the problem of inferring a reward function from an optimal policy or demonstrations by an expert. In this work, it is assumed that the reward is expressed as a reward machine whose transitions depend on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Mohamad Louai Shehab , Antoine Aspeel , Necmiye Ozay

This paper investigates the use of extreme value theory for modelling the distribution of demand-net-of-wind for capacity adequacy assessment. Extreme value theory approaches are well-established and mathematically justified methods for…

Applications · Statistics 2019-07-31 Amy L Wilson , Stan Zachary