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Despite the numerous advances, reinforcement learning remains away from widespread acceptance for autonomous controller design as compared to classical methods due to lack of ability to effectively tackle the reality gap. The reliance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Narendra Patwardhan , Zequn Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the careful design of the reward function. However, accurately assigning rewards to each state-action pair in Long-Term Reinforcement Learning (LTRL) tasks remains a significant challenge. As a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Qi Ju , Falin Hei , Zhemei Fang , Yunfeng Luo

The sim-to-real gap, which represents the disparity between training and testing environments, poses a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). A promising approach to addressing this challenge is distributionally robust RL,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Miao Lu , Han Zhong , Tong Zhang , Jose Blanchet

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically assume rewards to be sampled from light-tailed distributions, such as Gaussian or bounded. However, a wide variety of real-world systems generate rewards that follow heavy-tailed distributions. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Vincent Zhuang , Yanan Sui

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Vitchyr H. Pong , Rowan McAllister , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

Meta-reinforcement learning has widely been used as a learning-to-learn framework to solve unseen tasks with limited experience. However, the aspect of constraint violations has not been adequately addressed in the existing works, making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Vanshaj Khattar , Yuhao Ding , Bilgehan Sel , Javad Lavaei , Ming Jin

We study the problem of reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon discounted linear Markov decision processes (MDPs), and propose the first computationally efficient algorithm achieving rate-optimal regret guarantees in this setting. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Antoine Moulin , Gergely Neu , Luca Viano

Online map matching is a fundamental problem in location-based services, aiming to incrementally match trajectory data step-by-step onto a road network. However, existing methods fail to meet the needs for efficiency, robustness, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Minxiao Chen , Haitao Yuan , Nan Jiang , Zhihan Zheng , Sai Wu , Ao Zhou , Shangguang Wang

We study a posterior sampling approach to efficient exploration in constrained reinforcement learning. Alternatively to existing algorithms, we propose two simple algorithms that are more efficient statistically, simpler to implement and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-09 Danil Provodin , Pratik Gajane , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Maurits Kaptein

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Jan Humplik , Alexandre Galashov , Leonard Hasenclever , Pedro A. Ortega , Yee Whye Teh , Nicolas Heess

The use of Reinforcement Learning in real-world scenarios is strongly limited by issues of scale. Most RL learning algorithms are unable to deal with problems composed of hundreds or sometimes even dozens of possible actions, and therefore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-02 Gabriel Dulac-Arnold , Ludovic Denoyer , Philippe Preux , Patrick Gallinari

Reliant on too many experiments to learn good actions, current Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have limited applicability in real-world settings, which can be too expensive to allow exploration. We propose an algorithm for batch RL,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Rasool Fakoor , Jonas Mueller , Kavosh Asadi , Pratik Chaudhari , Alexander J. Smola

This paper addresses the problem of online inverse reinforcement learning for systems with limited data and uncertain dynamics. In the developed approach, the state and control trajectories are recorded online by observing an agent perform…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-08-21 Ryan Self , S M Nahid Mahmud , Katrine Hareland , Rushikesh Kamalapurkar

The correct specification of reward models is a well-known challenge in reinforcement learning. Hand-crafted reward functions often lead to inefficient or suboptimal policies and may not be aligned with user values. Reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Muhan Lin , Shuyang Shi , Yue Guo , Behdad Chalaki , Vaishnav Tadiparthi , Ehsan Moradi Pari , Simon Stepputtis , Joseph Campbell , Katia Sycara

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) assumes that an agent can observe a reward for each state-action pair. However, in practical applications, it is often difficult and costly to collect a reward for each state-action pair. While there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Yihan Du , Anna Winnicki , Gal Dalal , Shie Mannor , R. Srikant

Since the 1990s, considerable empirical work has been carried out to train statistical models, such as neural networks (NNs), as learned heuristics for combinatorial optimization (CO) problems. When successful, such an approach eliminates…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-21 Orit Davidovich , Shimrit Shtern , Segev Wasserkrug , Nimrod Megiddo

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) considers the setting where the agent does not have access to a reward function during exploration, but must propose a near-optimal policy for an arbitrary reward function revealed only after…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Andrew Wagenmaker , Yifang Chen , Max Simchowitz , Simon S. Du , Kevin Jamieson

Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Max Simchowitz , Tiancheng Yu

Reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome-based rewards has proven effective for improving large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, its success often depends on the base model occasionally sampling correct solutions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jatin Prakash , Anirudh Buvanesh

Offline (or batch) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms seek to learn an optimal policy from a fixed dataset without active data collection. Based on the composition of the offline dataset, two main categories of methods are used:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Paria Rashidinejad , Banghua Zhu , Cong Ma , Jiantao Jiao , Stuart Russell