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Data augmentation (DA) is a crucial technique for enhancing the sample efficiency of visual reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Notably, employing simple observation transformations alone can yield outstanding performance without extra…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Guozheng Ma , Linrui Zhang , Haoyu Wang , Lu Li , Zilin Wang , Zhen Wang , Li Shen , Xueqian Wang , Dacheng Tao

Marine obstacle detection demands robust segmentation under challenging conditions, such as sun glitter, fog, and rapidly changing wave patterns. These factors degrade image quality, while the scarcity and structural repetition of marine…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Miaohua Zhang , Mohammad Ali Armin , Xuesong Li , Sisi Liang , Lars Petersson , Changming Sun , David Ahmedt-Aristizabal , Zeeshan Hayder

Identifying the trade-offs between model-based and model-free methods is a central question in reinforcement learning. Value-based methods offer substantial computational advantages and are sometimes just as statistically efficient as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-13 David Cheikhi , Daniel Russo

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

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) aims to learn a dynamic model to reduce the number of interactions with real-world environments. However, due to estimation error, rollouts in the learned model, especially those of long horizons,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-17 Yueh-Hua Wu , Ting-Han Fan , Peter J. Ramadge , Hao Su

The theory of boosting provides a computational framework for aggregating approximate weak learning algorithms, which perform marginally better than a random predictor, into an accurate strong learner. In the realizable case, the success of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Udaya Ghai , Karan Singh

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language model (MLLM). However, current RL pipelines often suffer from training inefficiencies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Linghao Zhu , Yiran Guan , Dingkang Liang , Jianzhong Ju , Zhenbo Luo , Bin Qin , Jian Luan , Yuliang Liu , Xiang Bai

State-of-the-art model-based reinforcement learning methods train policies on imagined rollouts. These rollouts are trajectories generated by a learned dynamics model and are scored by a learned reward model, but without querying the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Nadav Timor , Ravid Shwartz-Ziv , Micah Goldblum , Yann LeCun , David Harel

This paper is concerned with offline reinforcement learning (RL), which learns using pre-collected data without further exploration. Effective offline RL would be able to accommodate distribution shift and limited data coverage. However,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-11 Gen Li , Laixi Shi , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi , Yuting Wei

We apply reinforcement learning (RL) to robotics tasks. One of the drawbacks of traditional RL algorithms has been their poor sample efficiency. One approach to improve the sample efficiency is model-based RL. In our model-based RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Adithya Ramesh , Balaraman Ravindran

Model-free reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to a range of challenging problems, and has recently been extended to handle large neural network policies and value functions. However, the sample complexity of model-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-03 Shixiang Gu , Timothy Lillicrap , Ilya Sutskever , Sergey Levine

Achieving sample efficiency in online episodic reinforcement learning (RL) requires optimally balancing exploration and exploitation. When it comes to a finite-horizon episodic Markov decision process with $S$ states, $A$ actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Gen Li , Laixi Shi , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi

In model-based reinforcement learning, most algorithms rely on simulating trajectories from one-step models of the dynamics learned on data. A critical challenge of this approach is the compounding of one-step prediction errors as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Abdelhakim Benechehab , Albert Thomas , Giuseppe Paolo , Maurizio Filippone , Balázs Kégl

In model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL), most algorithms rely on simulating trajectories from one-step dynamics models learned on data. A critical challenge of this approach is the compounding of one-step prediction errors as length of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-12 Abdelhakim Benechehab , Giuseppe Paolo , Albert Thomas , Maurizio Filippone , Balázs Kégl

In recent years, deep reinforcement learning has emerged as a technique to solve closed-loop flow control problems. Employing simulation-based environments in reinforcement learning enables a priori end-to-end optimization of the control…

Fluid Dynamics · Physics 2024-04-11 Andre Weiner , Janis Geise

We study how a Reinforcement Learning (RL) system can remain sample-efficient when learning from an imperfect model of the environment. This is particularly challenging when the learning system is resource-constrained and in continual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Bradley Burega , John D. Martin , Luke Kapeluck , Michael Bowling

Multistep returns, such as $n$-step returns and $\lambda$-returns, are commonly used to improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning (RL) methods. The variance of the multistep returns becomes the limiting factor in their length;…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Brett Daley , Martha White , Marlos C. Machado

Recently, data augmentation (DA) has emerged as a method for leveraging domain knowledge to inexpensively generate additional data in reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, often yielding substantial improvements in data efficiency. While prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Nicholas E. Corrado , Josiah P. Hanna

Despite its potential to improve sample complexity versus model-free approaches, model-based reinforcement learning can fail catastrophically if the model is inaccurate. An algorithm should ideally be able to trust an imperfect model over a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-25 Chenjun Xiao , Yifan Wu , Chen Ma , Dale Schuurmans , Martin Müller

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, such as Q-learning, directly parameterize and update value functions or policies without explicitly modeling the environment. They are typically simpler, more flexible to use, and thus more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Chi Jin , Zeyuan Allen-Zhu , Sebastien Bubeck , Michael I. Jordan