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We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Nadav Merlis

A reinforcement learning (RL) policy trained in a nominal environment could fail in a new/perturbed environment due to the existence of dynamic variations. Existing robust methods try to obtain a fixed policy for all envisioned dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-10 Yikun Cheng , Pan Zhao , Manan Gandhi , Bo Li , Evangelos Theodorou , Naira Hovakimyan

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy that maximizes the expected return using a given static dataset of transitions. However, offline RL faces the distribution shift problem. The policy constraint offline RL method is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Yuanhao Chen , Qi Liu , Pengbin Chen , Zhongjian Qiao , Yanjie Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to be robust to variations in safety-critical environments. While system identification methods provide a way to infer the variation from online experience, they can fail in settings where fast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-07 Annie Xie , Shagun Sodhani , Chelsea Finn , Joelle Pineau , Amy Zhang

Many sequential decision-making problems that are currently automated, such as those in manufacturing or recommender systems, operate in an environment where there is either little uncertainty, or zero risk of catastrophe. As companies and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Marc Rigter

In model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, using noisy value estimates to supervise policy evaluation and optimization is detrimental to the sample efficiency. As this noise is heteroscedastic, its effects can be mitigated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-04 Vincent Mai , Kaustubh Mani , Liam Paull

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are known to scale poorly to environments with many available actions, requiring numerous samples to learn an optimal policy. The traditional approach of considering the same fixed action space in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-15 Leo Ardon , Alberto Pozanco , Daniel Borrajo , Sumitra Ganesh

Envisioned application areas for reinforcement learning (RL) include autonomous driving, precision agriculture, and finance, which all require RL agents to make decisions in the real world. A significant challenge hindering the adoption of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-20 Dominik Baumann , Erfaun Noorani , James Price , Ole Peters , Colm Connaughton , Thomas B. Schön

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) provides a way to learn high-performance policies in environments where the reward signal is hard to specify, avoiding heuristic and time-consuming reward design. However, PbRL can suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Chenyang Cao , Miguel Rogel-García , Mohamed Nabail , Xueqian Wang , Nicholas Rhinehart

Reinforcement learning (RL) has revolutionized decision-making across a wide range of domains over the past few decades. Yet, deploying RL policies in real-world scenarios presents the crucial challenge of ensuring safety. Traditional safe…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-03-26 Lunet Yifru , Ali Baheri

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

Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Alexander W. Goodall , Edwin Hamel-De le Court , Francesco Belardinelli

Imitation learning has proven effective for training robots to perform complex tasks from expert human demonstrations. However, it remains limited by its reliance on high-quality, task-specific data, restricting adaptability to the diverse…

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

Deep neural networks coupled with fast simulation and improved computation have led to recent successes in the field of reinforcement learning (RL). However, most current RL-based approaches fail to generalize since: (a) the gap between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-09 Lerrel Pinto , James Davidson , Rahul Sukthankar , Abhinav Gupta

Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) seeks to address safety constraints by learning from static datasets and restricting exploration. However, these approaches heavily rely on the dataset and struggle to generalize to unseen scenarios…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Chenyang Cao , Yucheng Xin , Silang Wu , Longxiang He , Zichen Yan , Junbo Tan , Xueqian Wang

In order for reinforcement learning techniques to be useful in real-world decision making processes, they must be able to produce robust performance from limited data. Deep policy optimization methods have achieved impressive results on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-22 James Queeney , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Christos G. Cassandras

We study the problem of off-policy value evaluation in reinforcement learning (RL), where one aims to estimate the value of a new policy based on data collected by a different policy. This problem is often a critical step when applying RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-27 Nan Jiang , Lihong Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods often rely on massive exploration data to search optimal policies, and suffer from poor sampling efficiency. This paper presents a mixed reinforcement learning (mixed RL) algorithm by simultaneously using…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-03-03 Yao Mu , Shengbo Eben Li , Chang Liu , Qi Sun , Bingbing Nie , Bo Cheng , Baiyu Peng

Reinforcement Learning (RL) can effectively learn complex policies. However, learning these policies often demands extensive trial-and-error interactions with the environment. In many real-world scenarios, this approach is not practical due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-19 Linh Le Pham Van , Hung The Tran , Sunil Gupta