Related papers: Rethinking the Foundations for Continual Reinforce…

Reinforcement learning is now widely adopted as the final stage of large language model training, especially for reasoning-style tasks such as maths problems. Typically, models attempt each question many times during a single training step…

Reinforcement learning has traditionally focused on learning state-dependent policies to solve optimal control problems in a closed-loop fashion. In this work, we introduce the paradigm of open-loop reinforcement learning where a fixed…

Recent developments in sequential experimental design look to construct a policy that can efficiently navigate the design space, in a way that maximises the expected information gain. Whilst there is work on achieving tractable policies for…

Performance evaluations are critical for quantifying algorithmic advances in reinforcement learning. Recent reproducibility analyses have shown that reported performance results are often inconsistent and difficult to replicate. In this…

In reinforcement learning, the standard criterion to evaluate policies in a state is the expectation of (discounted) sum of rewards. However, this criterion may not always be suitable, we consider an alternative criterion based on the…

As more machine learning agents interact with humans, it is increasingly a prospect that an agent trained to perform a task optimally, using only a measure of task performance as feedback, can violate societal norms for acceptable behavior…

Reinforcement learning refers to a group of methods from artificial intelligence where an agent performs learning through trial and error. It differs from supervised learning, since reinforcement learning requires no explicit labels;…

Reinforcement learning has been established over the past decade as an effective tool to find optimal control policies for dynamical systems, with recent focus on approaches that guarantee safety during the learning and/or execution phases.…

Reinforcement learning, which acquires a policy maximizing long-term rewards, has been actively studied. Unfortunately, this learning type is too slow and difficult to use in practical situations because the state-action space becomes huge…

The Exploration-Exploitation tradeoff arises in Reinforcement Learning when one cannot tell if a policy is optimal. Then, there is a constant need to explore new actions instead of exploiting past experience. In practice, it is common to…

General purpose intelligent learning agents cycle through (complex,non-MDP) sequences of observations, actions, and rewards. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for small finite state Markov Decision Processes…

Rewards and punishments in different forms are pervasive and present in a wide variety of decision-making scenarios. By observing the outcome of a sufficient number of repeated trials, one would gradually learn the value and usefulness of a…

Traditional reinforcement learning usually assumes either episodic interactions with resets or continuous operation to minimize average or cumulative loss. While episodic settings have many theoretical results, resets are often unrealistic…

A long-term goal of reinforcement learning agents is to be able to perform tasks in complex real-world scenarios. The use of external information is one way of scaling agents to more complex problems. However, there is a general lack of…

Humans achieve efficient learning by relying on prior knowledge about the structure of naturally occurring tasks. There is considerable interest in designing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with similar properties. This includes…

In reinforcement learning, an agent interacts sequentially with an environment to maximize a reward, receiving only partial, probabilistic feedback. This creates a fundamental exploration-exploitation trade-off: the agent must explore to…

Decision making demands intricate interplay between perception, memory, and reasoning to discern optimal policies. Conventional approaches to decision making face challenges related to low sample efficiency and poor generalization. In…

General-purpose, intelligent, learning agents cycle through sequences of observations, actions, and rewards that are complex, uncertain, unknown, and non-Markovian. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for small…

Continual learning is an emerging subject in machine learning that aims to solve multiple tasks presented sequentially to the learner without forgetting previously learned tasks. Recently, many deep learning based approaches have been…

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov Decision Processes in which an agent repeatedly interacts with an environment that is modeled by a controlled Markov process. At each time step $t$, it earns a reward, and also incurs a…