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Although deep reinforcement learning has advanced significantly over the past several years, sample efficiency remains a major challenge. Careful choice of input representations can help improve efficiency depending on the structure present…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-08 John Mern , Dorsa Sadigh , Mykel Kochenderfer

In recommender systems such as news feed stream, it is essential to optimize the long-term utilities in the continuous user-system interaction processes. Previous works have proved the capability of reinforcement learning in this problem.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Fan Wang , Xiaomin Fang , Lihang Liu , Hao Tian , Zhiming Peng

Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting challenge in deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Despite dramatic improvements have been made, the problem is far from being solved and is especially challenging in environments with sparse or delayed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Federico Malato , Ville Hautamaki

In this paper, we leverage ideas from model-based control to address the sample efficiency problem of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Accelerating learning is an active field of RL highly relevant in the context of time-varying…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-05-23 Ibrahim Ahmed , Marcos Quinones-Grueiro , Gautam Biswas

A data-efficient learning-based control design method is proposed in this paper. It is based on learning a system dynamics model that is then leveraged in a two-level procedure. On the higher level, a simple but powerful optimization…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-03 Ludvig Svedlund , Constantin Cronrath , Jonas Fredriksson , Bengt Lennartson

We study off-policy reinforcement learning for controlling continuous-time Markov diffusion processes with discrete-time observations and actions. We consider model-free algorithms with function approximation that learn value and advantage…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Wenlong Mou

Applying reinforcement learning to robotic systems poses a number of challenging problems. A key requirement is the ability to handle continuous state and action spaces while remaining within a limited time and resource budget.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-29 Benjamin van Niekerk , Andreas Damianou , Benjamin Rosman

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

Data scarcity drives the need for more sample-efficient large language models. In this work, we use the double descent phenomenon to holistically compare the sample efficiency of discrete diffusion and autoregressive models. We show that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Ahmad Fraij , Sam Dauncey

Reinforcement learning is able to solve complex sequential decision-making tasks but is currently limited by sample efficiency and required computation. To improve sample efficiency, recent work focuses on model-based RL which interleaves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-19 Yi Zhao , Wenshuai Zhao , Rinu Boney , Juho Kannala , Joni Pajarinen

Diffusion models generate samples through an iterative denoising process, guided by a neural network. While training the denoiser on real-world data is computationally demanding, the sampling procedure itself is more flexible. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Constant Bourdrez , Alexandre Vérine , Olivier Cappé

Learning-based methods have improved locomotion skills of quadruped robots through deep reinforcement learning. However, the sim-to-real gap and low sample efficiency still limit the skill transfer. To address this issue, we propose an…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Haojie Shi , Tingguang Li , Qingxu Zhu , Jiapeng Sheng , Lei Han , Max Q. -H. Meng

Discrete adversarial attacks are symbolic perturbations to a language input that preserve the output label but lead to a prediction error. While such attacks have been extensively explored for the purpose of evaluating model robustness,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Maor Ivgi , Jonathan Berant

This paper discusses an Enhanced Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (E-MAML) algorithm that generates fast convergence of the policy function from a small number of training examples when applied to new learning tasks. Built on top of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-14 Ibrahim Ahmed , Marcos Quinones-Grueiro , Gautam Biswas

Model-free deep reinforcement learning algorithms have been shown to be capable of learning a wide range of robotic skills, but typically require a very large number of samples to achieve good performance. Model-based algorithms, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-05 Anusha Nagabandi , Gregory Kahn , Ronald S. Fearing , Sergey Levine

The popularity of data augmentation techniques in machine learning has increased in recent years, as they enable the creation of new samples from existing datasets. Rotational augmentation, in particular, has shown great promise by…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Unai Muñoz-Aseguinolaza , Basilio Sierra , Naiara Aginako

Vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising technique to solve control tasks involving images as the main observation. State-of-the-art RL algorithms still struggle in terms of sample efficiency, especially when using image…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-29 Elie Aljalbout , Maximilian Ulmer , Rudolph Triebel

Model-free reinforcement learning attempts to find an optimal control action for an unknown dynamical system by directly searching over the parameter space of controllers. The convergence behavior and statistical properties of these…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-17 Hesameddin Mohammadi , Armin Zare , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Mihailo R. Jovanović

The effectiveness of model-based versus model-free methods is a long-standing question in reinforcement learning (RL). Motivated by recent empirical success of RL on continuous control tasks, we study the sample complexity of popular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-05 Stephen Tu , Benjamin Recht

For over a decade, model-based reinforcement learning has been seen as a way to leverage control-based domain knowledge to improve the sample-efficiency of reinforcement learning agents. While model-based agents are conceptually appealing,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-28 Brandon Amos , Samuel Stanton , Denis Yarats , Andrew Gordon Wilson