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Online reinforcement learning (RL) with complex function approximations such as transformers and deep neural networks plays a significant role in the modern practice of artificial intelligence. Despite its popularity and importance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Tong Yang , Bo Dai , Lin Xiao , Yuejie Chi

Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL) provides a versatile framework for developing unified controllers capable of handling wide ranges of tasks, exploring environments, and adapting behaviors. However, its reliance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Charly Pecqueux-Guézénec , Stéphane Doncieux , Nicolas Perrin-Gilbert

We study robust reinforcement learning (RL) with the goal of determining a well-performing policy that is robust against model mismatch between the training simulator and the testing environment. Previous policy-based robust RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Ruida Zhou , Tao Liu , Min Cheng , Dileep Kalathil , P. R. Kumar , Chao Tian

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) is a subset of machine learning that introduces constraints into the traditional reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Unlike conventional RL which aims solely to maximize cumulative rewards, CRL…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Xiaoshan Lin , Sadık Bera Yüksel , Yasin Yazıcıoğlu , Derya Aksaray

In safety-critical domains where online data collection is infeasible, offline reinforcement learning (RL) offers an attractive alternative but only if policies deliver high returns without incurring catastrophic lower-tail risk. Prior work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Kai Fukazawa , Kunal Mundada , Iman Soltani

In the dynamic and uncertain environments where reinforcement learning (RL) operates, risk management becomes a crucial factor in ensuring reliable decision-making. Traditional RL approaches, while effective in reward optimization, often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Ali Baheri

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to mitigate unsafe behaviors that arise from exploration during training by reducing constraint violations while maintaining task performance. Existing approaches typically rely on a single policy to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Murad Dawood , Usama Ahmed Siddiquie , Shahram Khorshidi , Maren Bennewitz

Exploration remains a key challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). Optimism in the face of uncertainty is a well-known heuristic with theoretical guarantees in the tabular setting, but how best to translate the principle to deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Brendan O'Donoghue

This paper aims to solve a safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem with risk measure-based constraints. As risk measures, such as conditional value at risk (CVaR), focus on the tail distribution of cost signals, constraining risk measures…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-04 Dohyeong Kim , Songhwai Oh

Risk sensitivity has become a central theme in reinforcement learning (RL), where convex risk measures and robust formulations provide principled ways to model preferences beyond expected return. Recent extensions to multi-agent RL (MARL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Runyu Zhang , Na Li , Asuman Ozdaglar , Jeff Shamma , Gioele Zardini

Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers an attractive approach to learn control policies for high-dimensional systems, but its relatively poor sample complexity often forces training in simulated environments. Even in simulation,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-09-18 Boris Ivanovic , James Harrison , Apoorva Sharma , Mo Chen , Marco Pavone

In this work, we propose Behavior-Guided Actor-Critic (BAC), an off-policy actor-critic deep RL algorithm. BAC mathematically formulates the behavior of the policy through autoencoders by providing an accurate estimation of how frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-12 Ammar Fayad , Majd Ibrahim

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) faces significant challenges in addressing the hard-exploration problems in tasks with sparse or deceptive rewards and large state spaces. These challenges severely limit the practical application of DRL.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-03 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Ning Guo , Zhiming Zheng

Actor-critic methods, a type of model-free Reinforcement Learning, have been successfully applied to challenging tasks in continuous control, often achieving state-of-the art performance. However, wide-scale adoption of these methods in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-29 Kamil Ciosek , Quan Vuong , Robert Loftin , Katja Hofmann

In safe offline reinforcement learning (RL), the objective is to develop a policy that maximizes cumulative rewards while strictly adhering to safety constraints, utilizing only offline data. Traditional methods often face difficulties in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Prajwal Koirala , Zhanhong Jiang , Soumik Sarkar , Cody Fleming

The objective in a traditional reinforcement learning (RL) problem is to find a policy that optimizes the expected value of a performance metric such as the infinite-horizon cumulative discounted or long-run average cost/reward. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Prashanth L. A. , Michael Fu

Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Simone Parisi , Alireza Kazemipour , Michael Bowling

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is suitable for safety-critical domains where online exploration is too costly or dangerous. In such safety-critical settings, decision-making should take into consideration the risk of catastrophic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Marc Rigter , Bruno Lacerda , Nick Hawes

Improving the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning algorithms requires effective exploration. Following the principle of $\textit{optimism in the face of uncertainty}$ (OFU), we train a separate exploration policy to maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Jiachen Li , Shuo Cheng , Zhenyu Liao , Huayan Wang , William Yang Wang , Qinxun Bai

The development of Distributional Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has introduced a natural way to incorporate risk sensitivity into value-based and actor-critic methods by employing risk measures other than expectation in the value function.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Mehrdad Moghimi , Hyejin Ku