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Policy robustness in Reinforcement Learning may not be desirable at any cost: the alterations caused by robustness requirements from otherwise optimal policies should be explainable, quantifiable and formally verifiable. In this work we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Daniel Jarne Ornia , Licio Romao , Lewis Hammond , Manuel Mazo , Alessandro Abate

We study session-based recommendation scenarios where we want to recommend items to users during sequential interactions to improve their long-term utility. Optimizing a long-term metric is challenging because the learning signal (whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Bogdan Mazoure , Paul Mineiro , Pavithra Srinath , Reza Sharifi Sedeh , Doina Precup , Adith Swaminathan

The options framework is a popular approach for building temporally extended actions in reinforcement learning. In particular, the option-critic architecture provides general purpose policy gradient theorems for learning actions from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-07 Matthew Riemer , Ignacio Cases , Clemens Rosenbaum , Miao Liu , Gerald Tesauro

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Lior Shani , Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor

The intersection of causal inference and machine learning for decision-making is rapidly expanding, but the default decision criterion remains an \textit{average} of individual causal outcomes across a population. In practice, various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Wenshuo Guo , Michael I. Jordan , Angela Zhou

Constrained reinforcement learning has achieved promising progress in safety-critical fields where both rewards and constraints are considered. However, constrained reinforcement learning methods face challenges in striking the right…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Jianmina Ma , Jingtian Ji , Yue Gao

In this paper, we propose a distributed off-policy actor critic method to solve multi-agent reinforcement learning problems. Specifically, we assume that all agents keep local estimates of the global optimal policy parameter and update…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-25 Yan Zhang , Michael M. Zavlanos

In Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning, an agent learns to achieve multiple goals with a goal-conditioned policy. During learning, the agent first collects the trajectories into a replay buffer, and later these trajectories are selected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Rui Zhao , Xudong Sun , Volker Tresp

We introduce Multi-CALF, an algorithm that intelligently combines reinforcement learning policies based on their relative value improvements. Our approach integrates a standard RL policy with a theoretically-backed alternative policy,…

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

Policy gradient methods are widely used in reinforcement learning. Yet, the nonconvexity of policy optimization poses significant challenges in understanding the global convergence of policy gradient methods. For a class of finite-horizon…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Xin Chen , Yifan Hu , Minda Zhao

One of the fundamental challenges for offline reinforcement learning (RL) is ensuring robustness to data distribution. Whether the data originates from a near-optimal policy or not, we anticipate that an algorithm should demonstrate its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Xiaohan Hu , Yi Ma , Chenjun Xiao , Yan Zheng , Jianye Hao

This paper develops a policy learning method for tuning a pre-trained policy to adapt to additional tasks without altering the original task. A method named Adaptive Policy Gradient (APG) is proposed in this paper, which combines Bellman's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Wenjian Hao , Zehui Lu , Zihao Liang , Tianyu Zhou , Shaoshuai Mou

Despite recent breakthroughs in reinforcement learning (RL) and imitation learning (IL), existing algorithms fail to generalize beyond the training environments. In reality, humans can adapt to new tasks quickly by leveraging prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-18 Tianshi Cao , Jingkang Wang , Yining Zhang , Sivabalan Manivasagam

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

A widely used technique for improving policies is success conditioning, in which one collects trajectories, identifies those that achieve a desired outcome, and updates the policy to imitate the actions taken along successful trajectories.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Daniel Russo

Learning optimal behavior from existing data is one of the most important problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL). This is known as "off-policy control" in RL where an agent's objective is to compute an optimal policy based on the data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Prateek Jain , Prabuchandran K. J. , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Policy Iteration (PI) is a classical family of algorithms to compute an optimal policy for any given Markov Decision Problem (MDP). The basic idea in PI is to begin with some initial policy and to repeatedly update the policy to one from an…

Composing previously mastered skills to solve novel tasks promises dramatic improvements in the data efficiency of reinforcement learning. Here, we analyze two recent works composing behaviors represented in the form of action-value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-08 Jonathan J Hunt , Andre Barreto , Timothy P Lillicrap , Nicolas Heess

Off-policy evaluation is a key component of reinforcement learning which evaluates a target policy with offline data collected from behavior policies. It is a crucial step towards safe reinforcement learning and has been used in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-01 Jinlin Lai , Lixin Zou , Jiaxing Song

Many real-world problems require trading off multiple competing objectives. However, these objectives are often in different units and/or scales, which can make it challenging for practitioners to express numerical preferences over…