English
Related papers

Related papers: Rethinking the Foundations for Continual Reinforce…

200 papers

Safety is a critical feature of controller design for physical systems. When designing control policies, several approaches to guarantee this aspect of autonomy have been proposed, such as robust controllers or control barrier functions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Luiz F. O. Chamon , Santiago Paternain

Recommending a sequence of activities for an ongoing case requires that the recommendations conform to the underlying business process and meet the performance goal of either completion time or process outcome. Existing work on next…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-05-09 Prerna Agarwal , Avani Gupta , Renuka Sindhgatta , Sampath Dechu

Reinforcement learning (RL), a common tool in decision making, learns control policies from various experiences based on the associated cumulative return/rewards without treating them differently. Humans, on the contrary, often learn to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

In several reinforcement learning (RL) scenarios, mainly in security settings, there may be adversaries trying to interfere with the reward generating process. In this paper, we introduce Threatened Markov Decision Processes (TMDPs), which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-28 Victor Gallego , Roi Naveiro , David Rios Insua

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

Many recent successful (deep) reinforcement learning algorithms make use of regularization, generally based on entropy or Kullback-Leibler divergence. We propose a general theory of regularized Markov Decision Processes that generalizes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-05 Matthieu Geist , Bruno Scherrer , Olivier Pietquin

A reinforcement learning agent tries to maximize its cumulative payoff by interacting in an unknown environment. It is important for the agent to explore suboptimal actions as well as to pick actions with highest known rewards. Yet, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-23 Reazul Hasan Russel

When developing reinforcement learning agents, the standard approach is to train an agent to converge to a fixed policy that is as close to optimal as possible for a single fixed reward function. If different agent behaviour is required in…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-01-29 David O'Callaghan , Patrick Mannion

Reinforcement learning is a learning paradigm for solving sequential decision-making problems. Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in reinforcement learning upon the fast development of deep neural networks. Along with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Zhuangdi Zhu , Kaixiang Lin , Anil K. Jain , Jiayu Zhou

Alignment via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become the dominant paradigm for controlling the quality of outputs from large language models (LLMs). However, existing theories do not provide strong justification for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Jihun Yun , Juno Kim , Jongho Park , Junhyuck Kim , Jongha Jon Ryu , Jaewoong Cho , Kwang-Sung Jun

Intelligent systems have the ability to improve their behaviour over time taking observations, experiences or explicit feedback into account. Traditional approaches separate the learning problem and make isolated use of techniques from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-12 Simon Reichhuber , Sven Tomforde

Typical models of learning assume incremental estimation of continuously-varying decision variables like expected rewards. However, this class of models fails to capture more idiosyncratic, discrete heuristics and strategies that people and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Carlos G. Correa , Thomas L. Griffiths , Nathaniel D. Daw

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

We introduce a universal policy wrapper for reinforcement learning agents that ensures formal goal-reaching guarantees. In contrast to standard reinforcement learning algorithms that excel in performance but lack rigorous safety assurances,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Anton Bolychev , Georgiy Malaniya , Grigory Yaremenko , Anastasia Krasnaya , Pavel Osinenko

This paper proposes a new reinforcement learning with hyperbolic discounting. Combining a new temporal difference error with the hyperbolic discounting in recursive manner and reward-punishment framework, a new scheme to learn the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Taisuke Kobayashi

Many relevant tasks require an agent to reach a certain state, or to manipulate objects into a desired configuration. For example, we might want a robot to align and assemble a gear onto an axle or insert and turn a key in a lock. These…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-07-24 Carlos Florensa , David Held , Markus Wulfmeier , Michael Zhang , Pieter Abbeel

Continual learning aims to acquire tasks sequentially without catastrophic forgetting, yet standard strategies face a core tradeoff: regularization-based methods (e.g., EWC) can overconstrain updates when task optima are weakly overlapping,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zekun Wang , Anant Gupta , Christopher J. MacLellan

In this lecture, we present a general perspective on reinforcement learning (RL) objectives, where we show three versions of objectives. The first version is the standard definition of objective in RL literature. Then we extend the standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Long Yang

For most reinforcement learning approaches, the learning is performed by maximizing an accumulative reward that is expectedly and manually defined for specific tasks. However, in real world, rewards are emergent phenomena from the complex…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-05-23 Min Xu

Continual learning is an emerging paradigm in machine learning, wherein a model is exposed in an online fashion to data from multiple different distributions (i.e. environments), and is expected to adapt to the distribution change.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Binghui Peng , Andrej Risteski