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We study the offline meta-reinforcement learning (OMRL) problem, a paradigm which enables reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to quickly adapt to unseen tasks without any interactions with the environments, making RL truly practical in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-07 Lanqing Li , Rui Yang , Dijun Luo

In this paper we introduce and evaluate a distal explanation model for model-free reinforcement learning agents that can generate explanations for `why' and `why not' questions. Our starting point is the observation that causal models can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Prashan Madumal , Tim Miller , Liz Sonenberg , Frank Vetere

Supervised imitation-based approaches are often favored over off-policy reinforcement learning approaches for learning policies offline, since their straightforward optimization objective makes them computationally efficient and stable to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Adam Jelley , Trevor McInroe , Sam Devlin , Amos Storkey

Reinforcement learning with outcome-based feedback faces a fundamental challenge: when rewards are only observed at trajectory endpoints, how do we assign credit to the right actions? This paper provides the first comprehensive analysis of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Fan Chen , Zeyu Jia , Alexander Rakhlin , Tengyang Xie

As a marriage between offline RL and meta-RL, the advent of offline meta-reinforcement learning (OMRL) has shown great promise in enabling RL agents to multi-task and quickly adapt while acquiring knowledge safely. Among which,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Lanqing Li , Hai Zhang , Xinyu Zhang , Shatong Zhu , Yang Yu , Junqiao Zhao , Pheng-Ann Heng

Sample efficiency remains a major obstacle for real world adoption of reinforcement learning (RL): success has been limited to settings where simulators provide access to essentially unlimited environment interactions, which in reality are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Mattie Fellows , Clarisse Wibault , Uljad Berdica , Johannes Forkel , Michael A. Osborne , Jakob N. Foerster

As systems are getting more autonomous with the development of artificial intelligence, it is important to discover the causal knowledge from observational sensory inputs. By encoding a series of cause-effect relations between events,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-16 Yuhao Wang , Vlado Menkovski , Hao Wang , Xin Du , Mykola Pechenizkiy

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is believed to have higher sample efficiency compared with model-free reinforcement learning (MFRL). However, MBRL is plagued by dynamics bottleneck dilemma. Dynamics bottleneck dilemma is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Xiyao Wang , Junge Zhang , Wenzhen Huang , Qiyue Yin

The success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the ability to learn robust representations from the observations of the environment. In most cases, the representations learned purely by the reinforcement learning loss can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Somjit Nath , Rushiv Arora , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Causal effect estimation from observational data is fundamental across various applications. However, selecting an appropriate estimator from dozens of specialized methods demands substantial manual effort and domain expertise. We present…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Vahid Balazadeh , Hamidreza Kamkari , Valentin Thomas , Benson Li , Junwei Ma , Jesse C. Cresswell , Rahul G. Krishnan

In offline imitation learning (IL), an agent aims to learn an optimal expert behavior policy without additional online environment interactions. However, in many real-world scenarios, such as robotics manipulation, the offline dataset is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Bowei He , Zexu Sun , Jinxin Liu , Shuai Zhang , Xu Chen , Chen Ma

By adhering to the dictum, "No causation without manipulation (treatment, intervention)", cause and effect data analysis represents changes in observed data in terms of changes in the causal factors. When causal factors are not amenable for…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-25 M. Alex O. Vasilescu , Eric Kim , Xiao S. Zeng

Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) holds promise for data-efficiency by planning with model-generated experience in addition to learning with experience from the environment. However, in complex or changing environments, models in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Esra'a Saleh , John D. Martin , Anna Koop , Arash Pourzarabi , Michael Bowling

A pervasive challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the "curse of dimensionality" which is the exponential growth in the state-action space when optimizing a high-dimensional target task. The framework of curriculum learning trains the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-24 Mingxuan Li , Junzhe Zhang , Elias Bareinboim

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) approaches rely on discrete-time state transition models whereas physical systems and the vast majority of control tasks operate in continuous-time. To avoid time-discretization approximation of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Çağatay Yıldız , Markus Heinonen , Harri Lähdesmäki

Leveraging offline data is a promising way to improve the sample efficiency of online reinforcement learning (RL). This paper expands the pool of usable data for offline-to-online RL by leveraging abundant non-curated data that is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Yi Zhao , Aidan Scannell , Wenshuai Zhao , Yuxin Hou , Tianyu Cui , Le Chen , Dieter Büchler , Arno Solin , Juho Kannala , Joni Pajarinen

Many reinforcement learning (RL) environments consist of independent entities that interact sparsely. In such environments, RL agents have only limited influence over other entities in any particular situation. Our idea in this work is that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-03 Maximilian Seitzer , Bernhard Schölkopf , Georg Martius

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), training a policy from scratch with online experiences can be inefficient because of the difficulties in exploration. Recently, offline RL provides a promising solution by giving an initialized offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-14 Changhong Wang , Xudong Yu , Chenjia Bai , Qiaosheng Zhang , Zhen Wang

Reliant on too many experiments to learn good actions, current Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have limited applicability in real-world settings, which can be too expensive to allow exploration. We propose an algorithm for batch RL,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Rasool Fakoor , Jonas Mueller , Kavosh Asadi , Pratik Chaudhari , Alexander J. Smola

Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for recommender systems, enabling effective policy learning by interacting with frozen world models. However, the reward functions in these world models,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Yi Zhang , Ruihong Qiu , Xuwei Xu , Jiajun Liu , Sen Wang