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Reinforcement learning (RL) involves sequential decision making in uncertain environments. The aim of the decision-making agent is to maximize the benefit of acting in its environment over an extended period of time. Finding an optimal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Istvan Szita , Balint Takacs , Andras Lorincz

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved promising results on most robotic control tasks. Safety of learning-based controllers is an essential notion of ensuring the effectiveness of the controllers. Current methods adopt whole consistency…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-31 Haotian Xu , Shengjie Wang , Zhaolei Wang , Yunzhe Zhang , Qing Zhuo , Yang Gao , Tao Zhang

We present a representation-driven framework for reinforcement learning. By representing policies as estimates of their expected values, we leverage techniques from contextual bandits to guide exploration and exploitation. Particularly,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Ofir Nabati , Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor

A major challenge in deploying reinforcement learning in online tasks is ensuring that safety is maintained throughout the learning process. In this work, we propose CERL, a new method for solving constrained Markov decision processes while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-10 Yarden As , Bhavya Sukhija , Andreas Krause

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

Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to discover diverse behaviors that can accelerate the learning of downstream tasks. Previous methods typically focus on entropy-based exploration or empowerment-driven skill learning. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Ting Xiao , Jiakun Zheng , Rushuai Yang , Kang Xu , Qiaosheng Zhang , Peng Liu , Chenjia Bai

In the Bayesian approach to sequential decision making, exact calculation of the (subjective) utility is intractable. This extends to most special cases of interest, such as reinforcement learning problems. While utility bounds are known to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-11-14 Christos Dimitrakakis

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown a promising performance in learning optimal policies for a variety of sequential decision-making tasks. However, in many real-world RL problems, besides optimizing the main objectives, the agent is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Ashkan B. Jeddi , Nariman L. Dehghani , Abdollah Shafieezadeh

Reward engineering and designing an incentive reward function are non-trivial tasks to train agents in complex environments. Furthermore, an inaccurate reward function may lead to a biased behaviour which is far from an efficient and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-05-04 Saeed Tafazzol , Erfan Fathi , Mahdi Rezaei , Ehsan Asali

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to discover better actions through exploration. However, typical exploration techniques aim to maximize rewards, often incurring high costs in both exploration and learning processes. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Akane Tsuboya , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi

This paper studies reward-agnostic exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) -- a scenario where the learner is unware of the reward functions during the exploration stage -- and designs an algorithm that improves over the state of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Gen Li , Yuling Yan , Yuxin Chen , Jianqing Fan

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (URL) aims to pre-train agents by exploring diverse states or skills in reward-free environments, facilitating efficient adaptation to downstream tasks. As the agent cannot access extrinsic rewards during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Chengyang Ying , Huayu Chen , Xinning Zhou , Zhongkai Hao , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

Safety has been a major concern when deploying deep reinforcement learning algorithms in the real world. A promising direction that ensures that the learned policy does not visit unsafe regions is to learn a \emph{barrier function} along…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-22 Rupak Majumdar , Nikhil Singh , Sadegh Soudjani

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved phenomenal success in various domains. However, its data-driven nature also introduces new vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious opponents. Recent work shows that a well-trained RL agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Xiaolin Sun , Zizhan Zheng

Motivated by the prevailing paradigm of using unsupervised learning for efficient exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) problems [tang2017exploration,bellemare2016unifying], we investigate when this paradigm is provably efficient. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Fei Feng , Ruosong Wang , Wotao Yin , Simon S. Du , Lin F. Yang

Model free reinforcement learning suffers from the high sampling complexity inherent to robotic manipulation or locomotion tasks. Most successful approaches typically use random sampling strategies which leads to slow policy convergence. In…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-08-13 Miroslav Bogdanovic , Ludovic Righetti

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has recently enhanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), particularly for mathematical problem solving. However, a fundamental limitation remains: as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Wenhao Deng , Long Wei , Chenglei Yu , Tailin Wu

In many practical applications of RL, it is expensive to observe state transitions from the environment. For example, in the problem of plasma control for nuclear fusion, computing the next state for a given state-action pair requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Viraj Mehta , Biswajit Paria , Jeff Schneider , Stefano Ermon , Willie Neiswanger

In Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL), model learning is critical since an inaccurate model can bias policy learning via generating misleading samples. However, learning an accurate model can be difficult since the policy is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-23 Zifan Wu , Chao Yu , Chen Chen , Jianye Hao , Hankz Hankui Zhuo

Many real-world problems can be reduced to combinatorial optimization on a graph, where the subset or ordering of vertices that maximize some objective function must be found. With such tasks often NP-hard and analytically intractable,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-22 Thomas D. Barrett , William R. Clements , Jakob N. Foerster , A. I. Lvovsky