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Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

We consider a challenging theoretical problem in offline reinforcement learning (RL): obtaining sample-efficiency guarantees with a dataset lacking sufficient coverage, under only realizability-type assumptions for the function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Jinglin Chen , Nan Jiang

Reinforcement learning (RL) in sparse-reward environments remains a significant challenge due to the lack of informative feedback. We propose a simple yet effective method that uses a small number of successful demonstrations to initialize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Seyed Mahdi Basiri Azad , Joschka Boedecker

This study proposes a safe and sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) framework to address two major challenges in developing applicable RL algorithms: satisfying safety constraints and efficiently learning with limited samples. To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Hongyi Chen , Changliu Liu

The use of sparse neural networks has seen rapid growth in recent years, particularly in computer vision. Their appeal stems largely from the reduced number of parameters required to train and store, as well as in an increase in learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Laura Graesser , Utku Evci , Erich Elsen , Pablo Samuel Castro

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) learns policies entirely from static datasets, thereby avoiding the challenges associated with online data collection. Practical applications of offline RL will inevitably require learning from datasets…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Anikait Singh , Aviral Kumar , Quan Vuong , Yevgen Chebotar , Sergey Levine

Offline reinforcement learning algorithms hold the promise of enabling data-driven RL methods that do not require costly or dangerous real-world exploration and benefit from large pre-collected datasets. This in turn can facilitate…

Online Reinforcement Learning (RL) is typically framed as the process of minimizing cumulative regret (CR) through interactions with an unknown environment. However, real-world RL applications usually involve a sequence of tasks, and the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-28 Ziping Xu , Kelly W. Zhang , Susan A. Murphy

Reinforcement learning (RL) is typically concerned with estimating stationary policies or single-step models, leveraging the Markov property to factorize problems in time. However, we can also view RL as a generic sequence modeling problem,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Michael Janner , Qiyang Li , Sergey Levine

Offline reinforcement learning proposes to learn policies from large collected datasets without interacting with the physical environment. These algorithms have made it possible to learn useful skills from data that can then be deployed in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Samarth Sinha , Ajay Mandlekar , Animesh Garg

This paper prescribes a suite of techniques for off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) that simplify the training process and reduce the sample complexity. First, we show that simple Deterministic Policy Gradient works remarkably well as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Rasool Fakoor , Pratik Chaudhari , Alexander J. Smola

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great promise with algorithms learning in environments with large state and action spaces purely from scalar reward signals. A crucial challenge for current deep RL algorithms is that they require a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Shivakanth Sujit , Pedro H. M. Braga , Jorg Bornschein , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

In reinforcement learning (RL) research, it is common to assume access to direct online interactions with the environment. However in many real-world applications, access to the environment is limited to a fixed offline dataset of logged…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-27 Yifan Wu , George Tucker , Ofir Nachum

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in real-world decision-making across diverse domains, including gaming, robotics, online advertising, public health, and natural language processing. Despite these advances, a…

Applications · Statistics 2026-01-23 Asim H. Gazi , Yongyi Guo , Daiqi Gao , Ziping Xu , Kelly W. Zhang , Susan A. Murphy

Sparse coding--that is, modelling data vectors as sparse linear combinations of basis elements--is widely used in machine learning, neuroscience, signal processing, and statistics. This paper focuses on the large-scale matrix factorization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2010-02-11 Julien Mairal , Francis Bach , Jean Ponce , Guillermo Sapiro

This paper studies offline reinforcement learning with linear function approximation in a setting with decision-theoretic, but not estimation sparsity. The structural restrictions of the data-generating process presume that the transitions…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-01-24 Angela Zhou

Recent advancements in off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) have significantly improved sample efficiency, primarily due to the incorporation of various forms of regularization that enable more gradient update steps than traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Michal Nauman , Michał Bortkiewicz , Piotr Miłoś , Tomasz Trzciński , Mateusz Ostaszewski , Marek Cygan

We propose a general method called truncated gradient to induce sparsity in the weights of online learning algorithms with convex loss functions. This method has several essential properties: The degree of sparsity is continuous -- a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2008-07-04 John Langford , Lihong Li , Tong Zhang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy from a static dataset without further interactions with the environment. Collecting sufficiently large datasets for offline RL is exhausting since this data collection requires…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Jongchan Park , Mingyu Park , Donghwan Lee

This paper investigates a hybrid learning framework for reinforcement learning (RL) in which the agent can leverage both an offline dataset and online interactions to learn the optimal policy. We present a unified algorithm and analysis and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Ruiquan Huang , Donghao Li , Chengshuai Shi , Cong Shen , Jing Yang