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Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential in sequential decision-making. At present, mainstream RL algorithms are data-driven, which usually yield better asymptotic performance but much slower convergence compared with model-driven…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yang Guan , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li , Jie Li , Jianyu Chen , Bo Cheng

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training is crucial for LLM alignment and reasoning, but existing policy-based methods, such as PPO and DPO, can fall short of fixing shortcuts inherited from pre-training. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Jin Peng Zhou , Kaiwen Wang , Jonathan Chang , Zhaolin Gao , Nathan Kallus , Kilian Q. Weinberger , Kianté Brantley , Wen Sun

Adversarial optimization algorithms that explicitly search for flaws in agents' policies have been successfully applied to finding robust and diverse policies in multi-agent settings. However, the success of adversarial optimization has…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Niklas Lauffer , Ameesh Shah , Micah Carroll , Sanjit A. Seshia , Stuart Russell , Michael Dennis

In sequential decision-making problems, Return-Conditioned Supervised Learning (RCSL) has gained increasing recognition for its simplicity and stability in modern decision-making tasks. Unlike traditional offline reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Zhishuai Liu , Yu Yang , Ruhan Wang , Pan Xu , Dongruo Zhou

We study the problem of robust reinforcement learning under adversarial corruption on both rewards and transitions. Our attack model assumes an \textit{adaptive} adversary who can arbitrarily corrupt the reward and transition at every step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Xuezhou Zhang , Yiding Chen , Xiaojin Zhu , Wen Sun

Residual Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular approach for adapting pretrained policies by learning a lightweight residual policy that provides corrective actions. While Residual RL is more sample-efficient than finetuning the entire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Lakshita Dodeja , Karl Schmeckpeper , Shivam Vats , Thomas Weng , Mingxi Jia , George Konidaris , Stefanie Tellex

A promising paradigm for offline reinforcement learning (RL) is to constrain the learned policy to stay close to the dataset behaviors, known as policy constraint offline RL. However, existing works heavily rely on the purity of the data,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Chengqian Gao , Ke Xu , Liu Liu , Deheng Ye , Peilin Zhao , Zhiqiang Xu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) robot controllers usually aggregate many task objectives into one scalar reward. While large-scale proximal policy optimisation (PPO) has enabled impressive results such as robust robot locomotion in the real…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Humphrey Munn , Brendan Tidd , Peter Böhm , Marcus Gallagher , David Howard

Reward shaping is an effective technique for incorporating domain knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as potential-based reward shaping normally make full use of a given shaping reward function. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-06 Yujing Hu , Weixun Wang , Hangtian Jia , Yixiang Wang , Yingfeng Chen , Jianye Hao , Feng Wu , Changjie Fan

We study the problem of efficiently estimating policies that simultaneously optimize multiple objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). Given $n$ objectives (or tasks), we seek the optimal partition of these objectives into $k \ll n$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Zhenshuo Zhang , Minxuan Duan , Youran Ye , Hongyang R. Zhang

This paper introduces Meta-Q-Learning (MQL), a new off-policy algorithm for meta-Reinforcement Learning (meta-RL). MQL builds upon three simple ideas. First, we show that Q-learning is competitive with state-of-the-art meta-RL algorithms if…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Rasool Fakoor , Pratik Chaudhari , Stefano Soatto , Alexander J. Smola

Reinforcement learning (RL) -- algorithms that teach artificial agents to interact with environments by maximising reward signals -- has achieved significant success in recent years. These successes have been facilitated by advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Llewyn Salt , Marcus Gallagher

Ensuring the safety of Reinforcement Learning (RL) is crucial for its deployment in real-world applications. Nevertheless, managing the trade-off between reward and safety during exploration presents a significant challenge. Improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Shangding Gu , Bilgehan Sel , Yuhao Ding , Lu Wang , Qingwei Lin , Ming Jin , Alois Knoll

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for facilitating the self-improvement of large language models (LLMs), particularly in the domain of complex reasoning tasks. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Ziru Liu , Cheng Gong , Xinyu Fu , Yaofang Liu , Ran Chen , Shoubo Hu , Suiyun Zhang , Rui Liu , Qingfu Zhang , Dandan Tu

In this work, we address the problem of determining reliable policies in reinforcement learning (RL), with a focus on optimization under uncertainty and the need for performance guarantees. While classical RL algorithms aim at maximizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Nadir Farhi

Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is the predominant algorithm for training text generation models. This paradigm relies on direct supervision examples, which is not applicable to many emerging applications, such as generating adversarial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Han Guo , Bowen Tan , Zhengzhong Liu , Eric P. Xing , Zhiting Hu

Reinforcement learning considers the problem of finding policies that maximize an expected cumulative reward in a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities. In this paper we consider the problem of finding optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Santiago Paternain , Juan Andres Bazerque , Alejandro Ribeiro

Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The state-of-the-art estimates the optimal action values while it usually involves an extensive search over the state-action space and unstable optimization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-27 Kaixiang Lin , Jiayu Zhou

Many sequential decision-making tasks involve optimizing multiple conflicting objectives, requiring policies that adapt to different user preferences. In multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL), one widely studied approach} addresses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Ying-Tu Chen , Wei Hung , Bing-Shu Wu , Zhang-Wei Hong , Ping-Chun Hsieh