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Why do reinforcement learning (RL) policies fail or succeed? This is a challenging question due to the complex, high-dimensional nature of agent-environment interactions. In this work, we take a causal perspective on explaining the behavior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-22 Armin Kekić , Jan Schneider , Dieter Büchler , Bernhard Schölkopf , Michel Besserve

A key task in Artificial Intelligence is learning effective policies for controlling agents in unknown environments to optimize performance measures. Off-policy learning methods, like Q-learning, allow learners to make optimal decisions…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Mingxuan Li , Junzhe Zhang , Elias Bareinboim

We present GuidedSAC, a novel reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that facilitates efficient exploration in vast state-action spaces. GuidedSAC leverages large language models (LLMs) as intelligent supervisors that provide action-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Hao Ma , Zhiqiang Pu , Xiaolin Ai , Huimu Wang

In the trial-and-error mechanism of reinforcement learning (RL), a notorious contradiction arises when we expect to learn a safe policy: how to learn a safe policy without enough data and prior model about the dangerous region? Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-29 Haitong Ma , Changliu Liu , Shengbo Eben Li , Sifa Zheng , Wenchao Sun , Jianyu Chen

Actor-critic algorithms address the dual goals of reinforcement learning (RL), policy evaluation and improvement via two separate function approximators. The practicality of this approach comes at the expense of training instability, caused…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Bahareh Tasdighi , Abdullah Akgül , Manuel Haussmann , Kenny Kazimirzak Brink , Melih Kandemir

Safety is essential for reinforcement learning (RL) applied in real-world situations. Chance constraints are suitable to represent the safety requirements in stochastic systems. Previous chance-constrained RL methods usually have a low…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-17 Baiyu Peng , Yao Mu , Yang Guan , Shengbo Eben Li , Yuming Yin , Jianyu Chen

Discovering the causal effect of a decision is critical to nearly all forms of decision-making. In particular, it is a key quantity in drug development, in crafting government policy, and when implementing a real-world machine learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-04 Limor Gultchin , Matt J. Kusner , Varun Kanade , Ricardo Silva

As a key component to intuitive cognition and reasoning solutions in human intelligence, causal knowledge provides great potential for reinforcement learning (RL) agents' interpretability towards decision-making by helping reduce the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Ruichu Cai , Siyang Huang , Jie Qiao , Wei Chen , Yan Zeng , Keli Zhang , Fuchun Sun , Yang Yu , Zhifeng Hao

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have achieved impressive results in a wide range of complex tasks, but poor sample efficiency remains a major obstacle to real-world deployment. Soft actor-critic (SAC) mitigates this problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Luca Della Libera

Reinforcement learning has been proven to be highly effective in handling complex control tasks. Traditional methods typically use unimodal distributions, such as Gaussian distributions, to model the output of value distributions. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Tong Liu , Yinuo Wang , Xujie Song , Wenjun Zou , Liangfa Chen , Likun Wang , Bin Shuai , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li

The paradigm of decision-making has been revolutionised by reinforcement learning and deep learning. Although this has led to significant progress in domains such as robotics, healthcare, and finance, the use of RL in practice is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Daqian Shao

We propose a general formulation for addressing reinforcement learning (RL) problems in settings with observational data. That is, we consider the problem of learning good policies solely from historical data in which unobserved factors…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-31 Chaochao Lu , Bernhard Schölkopf , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms for continuous action spaces are known to be brittle toward hyperparameters as well as \cut{being}sample inefficient. Soft Actor Critic (SAC) proposes an off-policy deep actor critic algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Patrick Nadeem Ward , Ariella Smofsky , Avishek Joey Bose

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is one of the state-of-the-art off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms that is within the maximum entropy based RL framework. SAC is demonstrated to perform very well in a list of continous control tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Zhenyang Shi , Surya P. N. Singh

Most prior approaches to offline reinforcement learning (RL) utilize \textit{behavior regularization}, typically augmenting existing off-policy actor critic algorithms with a penalty measuring divergence between the policy and the offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-15 Haoran Xu , Xianyuan Zhan , Jianxiong Li , Honglei Yin

Discrete reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated exceptional performance in solving sequential decision tasks with discrete action spaces, such as Atari games. However, their effectiveness is hindered when applied to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Yechen Zhang , Jian Sun , Gang Wang , Zhuo Li , Wei Chen

Biological agents learn and act intelligently in spite of a highly limited capacity to process and store information. Many real-world problems involve continuous control, which represents a difficult task for artificial intelligence agents.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Tailia Malloy , Chris R. Sims , Tim Klinger , Miao Liu , Matthew Riemer , Gerald Tesauro

With the increasing demand for efficient and flexible robotic exploration solutions, Reinforcement Learning (RL) is becoming a promising approach in the field of autonomous robotic exploration. However, current RL-based exploration…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Chunyu Yang , Shengben Bi , Yihui Xu , Xin Zhang

During recent years, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has made successful incursions into complex decision-making applications such as robotics, autonomous driving or video games. Off-policy algorithms tend to be more sample-efficient than…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Jesus Bujalance Martin , Raphael Chekroun , Fabien Moutarde

Traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies are typically implemented with fixed control rates, often disregarding the impact of control rate selection. This can lead to inefficiencies as the optimal control rate varies with task…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Dong Wang , Giovanni Beltrame