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Related papers: Action abstractions for amortized sampling

200 papers

Real-world applications require RL algorithms to act safely. During learning process, it is likely that the agent executes sub-optimal actions that may lead to unsafe/poor states of the system. Exploration is particularly brittle in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-17 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob , Jérémie Mary

This paper addresses the challenge of navigation in large, visually complex environments with sparse rewards. We propose a method that uses object-oriented macro actions grounded in a topological map, allowing a simple Deep Q-Network (DQN)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Simon Hakenes , Tobias Glasmachers

Effective agent exploration remains a core challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) for complex discrete state-space environments, particularly under partial observability. This paper presents a decoupled hierarchical RL framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Qingyu Xiao , Yuanlin Chang , Youtian Du

Efficient allocation of resources to activities is pivotal in executing business processes but remains challenging. While resource allocation methodologies are well-established in domains like manufacturing, their application within…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-19 J. Middelhuis , R. Lo Bianco , E. Scherzer , Z. A. Bukhsh , I. J. B. F. Adan , R. M. Dijkman

Explaining reinforcement learning agents is challenging because policies emerge from complex reward structures and neural representations that are difficult for humans to interpret. Existing approaches often rely on curated demonstrations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Sahar Admoni , Assaf Hallak , Yftah Ziser , Omer Ben-Porat , Ofra Amir

This paper addresses the problem of learning abstractions that boost robot planning performance while providing strong guarantees of reliability. Although state-of-the-art hierarchical robot planning algorithms allow robots to efficiently…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Naman Shah , Siddharth Srivastava

While humans readily generalize abstract concepts to more complex or larger tasks, building Reinforcement Learning (RL) systems with this ability remains elusive. Here, we present the first theoretical model of how such Out-of-Distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Nasehatul Mustakim , Lucas Lehnert

In tasks aiming for long-term returns, planning becomes essential. We study generative modeling for planning with datasets repurposed from offline reinforcement learning. Specifically, we identify temporal consistency in the absence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Deqian Kong , Dehong Xu , Minglu Zhao , Bo Pang , Jianwen Xie , Andrew Lizarraga , Yuhao Huang , Sirui Xie , Ying Nian Wu

Intelligent decision-making within large and redundant action spaces remains challenging in deep reinforcement learning. Considering similar but ineffective actions at each step can lead to repetitive and unproductive trials. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Wenzhang Liu , Lianjun Jin , Lu Ren , Chaoxu Mu , Changyin Sun

Agentic Reinforcement Learning (Agentic RL) has shown remarkable potential in large language model-based (LLM) agents. These works can empower LLM agents to tackle complex tasks via multi-step, tool-integrated reasoning. However, an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Siwei Zhang , Yun Xiong , Xi Chen , Zi'an Jia , Renhong Huang , Jiarong Xu , Jiawei Zhang

Open-ended learning benefits immensely from the use of symbolic methods for goal representation as they offer ways to structure knowledge for efficient and transferable learning. However, the existing Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-20 Mehdi Zadem , Sergio Mover , Sao Mai Nguyen

Optimal control of complex environments with robotic systems faces two complementary and intertwined challenges: efficient organization of sensory state information and far-sighted action planning. Because the reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Abdullah Akgül , Gulcin Baykal , Manuel Haußmann , Mustafa Mert Çelikok , Melih Kandemir

Abstraction is an important aspect of intelligence which enables agents to construct robust representations for effective decision making. In the last decade, deep networks are proven to be effective due to their ability to form…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-28 Alper Ahmetoglu , Emre Ugur , Minoru Asada , Erhan Oztop

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Philippe Morere , Gilad Francis , Tom Blau , Fabio Ramos

The endeavor of artificial intelligence (AI) is to design autonomous agents capable of achieving complex tasks. Namely, reinforcement learning (RL) proposes a theoretical background to learn optimal behaviors. In practice, RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Firas Jarboui , Ahmed Akakzia

A key impediment to reinforcement learning (RL) in real applications with limited, batch data is defining a reward function that reflects what we implicitly know about reasonable behaviour for a task and allows for robust off-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Niranjani Prasad , Barbara E Engelhardt , Finale Doshi-Velez

This paper presents a framework for learning state and action abstractions in sequential decision-making domains. Our framework, planning abstraction from language (PARL), utilizes language-annotated demonstrations to automatically discover…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Weiyu Liu , Geng Chen , Joy Hsu , Jiayuan Mao , Jiajun Wu

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are a class of generative models that sample objects in proportion to a specified reward function through a learned policy. They can be trained either on-policy or off-policy, needing a balance between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Dominic Phillips , Flaviu Cipcigan

Solving complex, temporally-extended tasks is a long-standing problem in reinforcement learning (RL). We hypothesize that one critical element of solving such problems is the notion of compositionality. With the ability to learn concepts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Yiding Jiang , Shixiang Gu , Kevin Murphy , Chelsea Finn

Recently, various auxiliary tasks have been proposed to accelerate representation learning and improve sample efficiency in deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, existing auxiliary tasks do not take the characteristics of RL problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-23 Guoqing Liu , Chuheng Zhang , Li Zhao , Tao Qin , Jinhua Zhu , Jian Li , Nenghai Yu , Tie-Yan Liu