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Related papers: Fine-tuning Behavioral Cloning Policies with Prefe…

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Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) needs an environment to collect fresh data, which is impractical when online interactions are costly. Offline RL provides an alternative solution by directly learning from the previously collected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Han Zheng , Xufang Luo , Pengfei Wei , Xuan Song , Dongsheng Li , Jing Jiang

Applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems is often made challenging by the inability to interact with the environment and the difficulty of designing reward functions. Offline RL addresses the first challenge by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Alizée Pace , Bernhard Schölkopf , Gunnar Rätsch , Giorgia Ramponi

Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a practical paradigm that leverages offline datasets for pretraining and online interactions for fine-tuning. However, its empirical behavior is highly inconsistent: design…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Lu Li , Tianwei Ni , Yihao Sun , Pierre-Luc Bacon

A major challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the difficulty of learning an optimal policy from sparse rewards. Prior works enhance online RL with conventional Imitation Learning (IL) via a handcrafted auxiliary objective, at the cost…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Shilong Deng , Zetao Zheng , Hongcai He , Paul Weng , Jie Shao

In this paper, we investigate preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), which enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn from human feedback. This is particularly valuable when defining a fine-grain reward function is not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Guojian Wang , Jianxiang Liu , Xinyuan Li , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Tianyuan Chen , Xuyang Chen

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

Pre-training with offline data and online fine-tuning using reinforcement learning is a promising strategy for learning control policies by leveraging the best of both worlds in terms of sample efficiency and performance. One natural…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Haichao Zhang , We Xu , Haonan Yu

We consider the problem of preference based reinforcement learning (PbRL), where, unlike traditional reinforcement learning, an agent receives feedback only in terms of a 1 bit (0/1) preference over a trajectory pair instead of absolute…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Aldo Pacchiano , Aadirupa Saha , Jonathan 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

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

Offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides an effective way to overcome the challenges of designing reward and the high costs of online interaction. However, since labeling preference needs real-time human feedback,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Xiao-Yin Liu , Guotao Li , Xiao-Hu Zhou , Zeng-Guang Hou

Reinforcement learning (RL) -- finding the optimal behaviour (also referred to as policy) maximizing the collected long-term cumulative reward -- is among the most influential approaches in machine learning with a large number of successful…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-28 Tao Ma , Xuzhi Yang , Zoltan Szabo

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is a standard paradigm for safety-critical decision making. However, real-world safety constraints can be complex, subjective, and even hard to explicitly specify. Existing works on constraint inference rely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Chenglin Li , Grant Ruan , Hua Geng

State-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms mostly rely on being allowed to directly interact with their environment to collect millions of observations. This makes it hard to transfer their success to industrial control problems,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-23 Phillip Swazinna , Steffen Udluft , Thomas Runkler

This paper focuses on reinforcement learning (RL) with limited prior knowledge. In the domain of swarm robotics for instance, the expert can hardly design a reward function or demonstrate the target behavior, forbidding the use of both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-08-07 Riad Akrour , Marc Schoenauer , Michèle Sebag

Offline reinforcement learning has become one of the most practical RL settings. However, most existing works on offline RL focus on the standard setting with scalar reward feedback. It remains unknown how to universally transfer the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Yinglun Xu , David Zhu , Rohan Gumaste , Gagandeep Singh

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can acquire effective policies by utilizing previously collected experience, without any online interaction. It is widely understood that offline RL is able to extract good policies even from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-13 Aviral Kumar , Joey Hong , Anikait Singh , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Evan Zheran Liu , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Tianlin Shi , Percy Liang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-06 Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou

Behavior Cloning (BC) has emerged as a highly effective paradigm for robot learning. However, BC lacks a self-guided mechanism for online improvement after demonstrations have been collected. Existing offline-to-online learning methods…