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Using learned reward functions (LRFs) as a means to solve sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) tasks has yielded some steady progress in task-complexity through the years. In this work, we question whether today's LRFs are best-suited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-24 Ademi Adeniji , Amber Xie , Carmelo Sferrazza , Younggyo Seo , Stephen James , Pieter Abbeel

Many real-world bandit applications are characterized by sparse rewards, which can significantly hinder learning efficiency. Leveraging problem-specific structures for careful distribution modeling is recognized as essential for improving…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-04 Haoyu Wei , Runzhe Wan , Lei Shi , Rui Song

In recent years, deep off-policy actor-critic algorithms have become a dominant approach to reinforcement learning for continuous control. One of the primary drivers of this improved performance is the use of pessimistic value updates to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-07 Ted Moskovitz , Jack Parker-Holder , Aldo Pacchiano , Michael Arbel , Michael I. Jordan

In a typical stochastic multi-armed bandit problem, the objective is often to maximize the expected sum of rewards over some time horizon $T$. While the choice of a strategy that accomplishes that is optimal with no additional information,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Reda Alami , Mohammed Mahfoud , Mastane Achab

We consider the stochastic linear (multi-armed) contextual bandit problem with the possibility of hidden simple multi-armed bandit structure in which the rewards are independent of the contextual information. Algorithms that are designed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-07 Niladri S. Chatterji , Vidya Muthukumar , Peter L. Bartlett

Stochastic multi-armed bandits (MABs) provide a fundamental reinforcement learning model to study sequential decision making in uncertain environments. The upper confidence bounds (UCB) algorithm gave birth to the renaissance of bandit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Ambrus Tamás , Szabolcs Szentpéteri , Balázs Csanád Csáji

Designing effective reward functions is critical for reinforcement learning-based biomechanical simulations, yet HCI researchers and practitioners often waste (computation) time with unintuitive trial-and-error tuning. This paper…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Hannah Selder , Florian Fischer , Per Ola Kristensson , Arthur Fleig

Foundation models compress a large amount of information in a single, large neural network, which can then be queried for individual tasks. There are strong parallels between this widespread framework and offline goal-conditioned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Marco Bagatella , Mert Albaba , Jonas Hübotter , Georg Martius , Andreas Krause

Submodular optimization with bandit feedback has recently been studied in a variety of contexts. In a number of real-world applications such as diversified recommender systems and data summarization, the submodular function exhibits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Wenjing Chen , Victoria G. Crawford

This paper studies performative risk minimization, a formulation of stochastic optimization under decision-dependent distributions. We consider the general case where the performative risk can be non-convex, for which we develop efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Sungwoo Park , Junyeop Kwon , Byeongnoh Kim , Suhyun Chae , Jeeyong Lee , Dabeen Lee

The challenge of designing effective reward functions in reinforcement learning (RL) represents a significant bottleneck, often requiring extensive human expertise and being time-consuming. Previous work and recent advancements in large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Franklin Cardenoso , Wouter Caarls

Zero-shot reinforcement learning is necessary for extracting optimal policies in absence of concrete rewards for fast adaptation to future problem settings. Forward-backward representations (FB) have emerged as a promising method for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Núria Armengol Urpí , Marin Vlastelica , Georg Martius , Stelian Coros

The performance of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms is sensitive to the choice of hyperparameters, with the learning rate being particularly influential. RL algorithms fail to reach convergence or demand an extensive number of samples…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Aida Afshar , Aldo Pacchiano

Multi-armed Bandits (MABs) are increasingly employed in online platforms and e-commerce to optimize decision making for personalized user experiences. In this work, we focus on the Contextual Bandit problem with linear rewards, under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Rowan Swiers , Subash Prabanantham , Andrew Maher

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems typically optimize scalar reward functions that assume precise and reliable evaluation of outcomes. However, real-world objectives--especially those derived from human preferences--are often uncertain,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Disha Singha

Offline (or batch) reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms seek to learn an optimal policy from a fixed dataset without active data collection. Based on the composition of the offline dataset, two main categories of methods are used:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Paria Rashidinejad , Banghua Zhu , Cong Ma , Jiantao Jiao , Stuart Russell

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) aims at pre-training agents that can solve a wide range of downstream tasks in complex environments. Despite recent advancements, existing approaches suffer from several limitations: they may require…

Offline or batch reinforcement learning seeks to learn a near-optimal policy using history data without active exploration of the environment. To counter the insufficient coverage and sample scarcity of many offline datasets, the principle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Laixi Shi , Gen Li , Yuting Wei , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi

Multi-task reinforcement learning aims to quickly identify solutions for new tasks with minimal or no additional interaction with the environment. Generalized Policy Improvement (GPI) addresses this by combining a set of base policies to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Lucas N. Alegre , Ana L. C. Bazzan , André Barreto , Bruno C. da Silva

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) provides a way to learn a transition model of the environment, which can then be used to plan personalized policies for different patient cohorts and to understand the dynamics involved in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-22 Abhishek Sharma , Sonali Parbhoo , Omer Gottesman , Finale Doshi-Velez