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Reinforcement learning is about learning agent models that make the best sequential decisions in unknown environments. In an unknown environment, the agent needs to explore the environment while exploiting the collected information, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Hong Qian , Yang Yu

Training a deep neural network to maximize a target objective has become the standard recipe for successful machine learning over the last decade. These networks can be optimized with supervised learning, if the target objective is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Bernhard Jaeger , Andreas Geiger

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Viraj Mehta , Ian Char , Joseph Abbate , Rory Conlin , Mark D. Boyer , Stefano Ermon , Jeff Schneider , Willie Neiswanger

The process of meta-learning algorithms from data, instead of relying on manual design, is growing in popularity as a paradigm for improving the performance of machine learning systems. Meta-learning shows particular promise for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Alexander David Goldie , Zilin Wang , Jaron Cohen , Jakob Nicolaus Foerster , Shimon Whiteson

Discounted reinforcement learning is fundamentally incompatible with function approximation for control in continuing tasks. It is not an optimization problem in its usual formulation, so when using function approximation there is no…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-28 Abhishek Naik , Roshan Shariff , Niko Yasui , Hengshuai Yao , Richard S. Sutton

Several recent works have been dedicated to unsupervised reinforcement learning in a single environment, in which a policy is first pre-trained with unsupervised interactions, and then fine-tuned towards the optimal policy for several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-17 Mirco Mutti , Mattia Mancassola , Marcello Restelli

Reinforcement learning~(RL) is a versatile framework for learning to solve complex real-world tasks. However, influences on the learning performance of RL algorithms are often poorly understood in practice. We discuss different analysis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Jan Schneider , Pierre Schumacher , Daniel Häufle , Bernhard Schölkopf , Dieter Büchler

Reinforcement learning can greatly benefit from the use of options as a way of encoding recurring behaviours and to foster exploration. An important open problem is how can an agent autonomously learn useful options when solving particular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-07 Manuel Del Verme , Bruno Castro da Silva , Gianluca Baldassarre

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central problem in artificial intelligence. This problem consists of defining artificial agents that can learn optimal behaviour by interacting with an environment -- where the optimal behaviour is defined…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm in Artificial Intelligence (AI), enabling agents to learn optimal behaviors through interactions with their environments. Drawing from the foundations of trial and error, RL…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Majid Ghasemi , Amir Hossein Moosavi , Dariush Ebrahimi

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

We present a new model-based algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) which consists of explicit exploration and exploitation phases, and is applicable in large or infinite state spaces. The algorithm maintains a set of dynamics models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Mikael Henaff

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

In distributed optimization, the practical problem-solving performance is essentially sensitive to algorithm selection, parameter setting, problem type and data pattern. Thus, it is often laborious to acquire a highly efficient method for a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-04 Daokuan Zhu , Tianqi Xu , Jie Lu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Grigorii Veviurko , Wendelin Böhmer , Mathijs de Weerdt

Resource allocation plays a critical role in minimizing cycle time and improving the efficiency of business processes. Recently, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as a powerful technique to optimize resource allocation policies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Jeroen Middelhuis , Zaharah Bukhsh , Ivo Adan , Remco Dijkman

We consider a class of reinforcement-learning systems in which the agent follows a behavior policy to explore a discrete state-action space to find an optimal policy while adhering to some restriction on its behavior. Such restriction may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-07 Peter C. Y. Chen

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

The exploration \& exploitation dilemma poses significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, curiosity-based exploration methods achieved great success in tackling hard-exploration problems. However, they necessitate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Yiran Wang , Chenshu Liu , Yunfan Li , Sanae Amani , Bolei Zhou , Lin F. Yang