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Related papers: SR-Reward: Taking The Path More Traveled

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Reinforcement learning (RL) in sparse-reward environments remains a significant challenge due to the lack of informative feedback. We propose a simple yet effective method that uses a small number of successful demonstrations to initialize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Seyed Mahdi Basiri Azad , Joschka Boedecker

With the advent of large datasets, offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising framework for learning good decision-making policies without the need to interact with the real environment. However, offline RL requires the dataset to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-27 Yicheng Luo , Zhengyao Jiang , Samuel Cohen , Edward Grefenstette , Marc Peter Deisenroth

We study the problem of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), where the learning agent recovers a reward function using expert demonstrations. Most of the existing IRL techniques make the often unrealistic assumption that the agent has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-20 Franck Djeumou , Murat Cubuktepe , Craig Lennon , Ufuk Topcu

Transfer in Reinforcement Learning aims to improve learning performance on target tasks using knowledge from experienced source tasks. Successor Representations (SR) and their extension Successor Features (SF) are prominent transfer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-03 Chris Reinke , Xavier Alameda-Pineda

In this work, we present Transitive Reinforcement Learning (TRL), a new value learning algorithm based on a divide-and-conquer paradigm. TRL is designed for offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) problems, where the aim is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Seohong Park , Aditya Oberai , Pranav Atreya , Sergey Levine

During recent years, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has made successful incursions into complex decision-making applications such as robotics, autonomous driving or video games. Off-policy algorithms tend to be more sample-efficient than…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Jesus Bujalance Martin , Raphael Chekroun , Fabien Moutarde

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework which is suitable for both the batch RL setting and the setting where there are many reward functions of interest. During the exploration phase, an agent collects samples without using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ruosong Wang , Simon S. Du , Lin F. Yang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

We study the use of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) as a tool for the recognition of agents' behavior on the basis of observation of their sequential decision behavior interacting with the environment. We model the problem faced by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-03-22 Qifeng Qiao , Peter A. Beling

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a powerful framework for training robotic agents using pre-collected, suboptimal datasets, eliminating the need for costly, time-consuming, and potentially hazardous online interactions. This is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Tung M. Luu , Donghoon Lee , Younghwan Lee , Chang D. Yoo

Aligning human preference and value is an important requirement for contemporary foundation models. State-of-the-art techniques such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) often consist of two stages: 1) supervised fine-tuning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Jiaxiang Li , Siliang Zeng , Hoi-To Wai , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

This paper studies satisfaction of temporal properties on unknown stochastic processes that have continuous state spaces. We show how reinforcement learning (RL) can be applied for computing policies that are finite-memory and deterministic…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-29 Milad Kazemi , Sadegh Soudjani

Learning complex policies with Reinforcement Learning (RL) is often hindered by instability and slow convergence, a problem exacerbated by the difficulty of reward engineering. Imitation Learning (IL) from expert demonstrations bypasses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Sayambhu Sen , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Current reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can be brittle and difficult to use, especially when learning goal-reaching behaviors from sparse rewards. Although supervised imitation learning provides a simple and stable alternative, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Dibya Ghosh , Abhishek Gupta , Ashwin Reddy , Justin Fu , Coline Devin , Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine

Learning to imitate expert behavior from demonstrations can be challenging, especially in environments with high-dimensional, continuous observations and unknown dynamics. Supervised learning methods based on behavioral cloning (BC) suffer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-27 Siddharth Reddy , Anca D. Dragan , Sergey Levine

Off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) holds the promise of better data efficiency as it allows sample reuse and potentially enables safe interaction with the environment. Current off-policy policy gradient methods either suffer from high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Samuele Tosatto , João Carvalho , Jan Peters

In robotic systems, the performance of reinforcement learning depends on the rationality of predefined reward functions. However, manually designed reward functions often lead to policy failures due to inaccuracies. Inverse Reinforcement…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Yongkai Tian , Yirong Qi , Xin Yu , Wenjun Wu , Jie Luo

This paper addresses the problem of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) -- inferring the reward function of an agent from observing its behavior. IRL can provide a generalizable and compact representation for apprenticeship learning, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-10 Marwa Abdulhai , Natasha Jaques , Sergey Levine

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) refers to the problem of learning policies entirely from a large batch of previously collected data. This problem setting offers the promise of utilizing such datasets to acquire policies without any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Tianhe Yu , Garrett Thomas , Lantao Yu , Stefano Ermon , James Zou , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn , Tengyu Ma

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is computationally challenging, with common approaches requiring the solution of multiple reinforcement learning (RL) sub-problems. This work motivates the use of potential-based reward shaping to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Lauren H. Cooke , Harvey Klyne , Edwin Zhang , Cassidy Laidlaw , Milind Tambe , Finale Doshi-Velez

Recent methods for imitation learning directly learn a $Q$-function using an implicit reward formulation rather than an explicit reward function. However, these methods generally require implicit reward regularization to improve stability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Firas Al-Hafez , Davide Tateo , Oleg Arenz , Guoping Zhao , Jan Peters