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Efficient exploration for an agent is challenging in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, a novel actor-critic framework namely virtual action actor-critic (VAAC), is proposed to address the challenge of efficient exploration in RL.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Bumgeun Park , Taeyoung Kim , Quoc-Vinh Lai-Dang , Dongsoo Har

Off-policy actor-critic algorithms have shown strong potential in deep reinforcement learning for continuous control tasks. Their success primarily comes from leveraging pessimistic state-action value function updates, which reduce function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Bahareh Tasdighi , Nicklas Werge , Yi-Shan Wu , Melih Kandemir

In this paper, we study a novel episodic risk-sensitive Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem, named Iterated CVaR RL, which aims to maximize the tail of the reward-to-go at each step, and focuses on tightly controlling the risk of getting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-12 Yihan Du , Siwei Wang , Longbo Huang

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

Ensuring safety in Reinforcement Learning (RL), typically framed as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP), is crucial for real-world exploration applications. Current approaches in handling CMDP struggle to balance optimality and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-07 Zhaorun Chen , Zhuokai Zhao , Tairan He , Binhao Chen , Xuhao Zhao , Liang Gong , Chengliang Liu

Many reinforcement learning (RL) problems in practice are offline, learning purely from observational data. A key challenge is how to ensure the learned policy is safe, which requires quantifying the risk associated with different actions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Yecheng Jason Ma , Dinesh Jayaraman , Osbert Bastani

While deep reinforcement learning has achieved tremendous successes in various applications, most existing works only focus on maximizing the expected value of total return and thus ignore its inherent stochasticity. Such stochasticity is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Han Zhong , Xun Deng , Ethan X. Fang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Runze Li

Offline safe reinforcement learning(OSRL) derives constraint-satisfying policies from pre-collected datasets, offers a promising avenue for deploying RL in safety-critical real-world domains such as robotics. However, the majority of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Zhikun Tao

Modern reinforcement learning (RL) struggles to capture real-world cause-and-effect dynamics, leading to inefficient exploration due to extensive trial-and-error actions. While recent efforts to improve agent exploration have leveraged…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Minh Hoang Nguyen , Hung Le , Svetha Venkatesh

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

Constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) has gained significant interest recently, since safety constraints satisfaction is critical for real-world problems. However, existing CRL methods constraining discounted cumulative costs generally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-08 Dongjie Yu , Haitong Ma , Shengbo Eben Li , Jianyu Chen

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) aims to optimize policies that balance the expected reward and risk. In this paper, we present a novel risk-sensitive RL framework that employs an Iterated Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Yu Chen , Yihan Du , Pihe Hu , Siwei Wang , Desheng Wu , Longbo Huang

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework under a broad class of risk objectives, characterized by convex scoring functions. This class covers many common risk measures, such as variance, Expected Shortfall, entropic Value-at-Risk,…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-05-16 Shanyu Han , Yang Liu , Xiang Yu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental framework for sequential decision-making, in which an agent learns an optimal policy through interactions with an unknown environment. In settings with function approximation, many existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ruiquan Huang , Donghao Li , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is a powerful paradigm for inferring a reward function from expert demonstrations. Many IRL algorithms require a known transition model and sometimes even a known expert policy, or they at least require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-23 David Lindner , Andreas Krause , Giorgia Ramponi

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for many control applications but faces challenges such as limited data coverage and value function overestimation. In this paper, we propose an implicit actor-critic (iAC)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-29 Vanshaj Khattar , Ming Jin

This paper studies reward-agnostic exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) -- a scenario where the learner is unware of the reward functions during the exploration stage -- and designs an algorithm that improves over the state of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Gen Li , Yuling Yan , Yuxin Chen , Jianqing Fan

Many sequential decision-making tasks involve optimizing multiple conflicting objectives, requiring policies that adapt to different user preferences. In multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL), one widely studied approach} addresses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Ying-Tu Chen , Wei Hung , Bing-Shu Wu , Zhang-Wei Hong , Ping-Chun Hsieh

Offline safe reinforcement learning (OSRL) involves learning a decision-making policy to maximize rewards from a fixed batch of training data to satisfy pre-defined safety constraints. However, adapting to varying safety constraints during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Yassine Chemingui , Aryan Deshwal , Honghao Wei , Alan Fern , Janardhan Rao Doppa

Robust Reinforcement Learning aims to find the optimal policy with some extent of robustness to environmental dynamics. Existing learning algorithms usually enable the robustness through disturbing the current state or simulating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Linfang Hou , Liang Pang , Xin Hong , Yanyan Lan , Zhiming Ma , Dawei Yin