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Reinforcement learning (RL) in large or infinite state spaces is notoriously challenging, both theoretically (where worst-case sample and computational complexities must scale with state space cardinality) and experimentally (where function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Marcel Hussing , Michael Kearns , Aaron Roth , Sikata Bela Sengupta , Jessica Sorrell

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Effective planning in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) and model-predictive control (MPC) relies on the accuracy of the learned dynamics model. In many instances of MBRL and MPC, this model is assumed to be stationary and is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yizhou Huang , Kevin Xie , Homanga Bharadhwaj , Florian Shkurti

Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to discover diverse behaviors that can accelerate the learning of downstream tasks. Previous methods typically focus on entropy-based exploration or empowerment-driven skill learning. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Ting Xiao , Jiakun Zheng , Rushuai Yang , Kang Xu , Qiaosheng Zhang , Peng Liu , Chenjia Bai

We propose Convex Constraint Learning for Reinforcement Learning (CoCoRL), a novel approach for inferring shared constraints in a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) from a set of safe demonstrations with possibly different reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 David Lindner , Xin Chen , Sebastian Tschiatschek , Katja Hofmann , Andreas Krause

We consider a team of reinforcement learning agents that concurrently operate in a common environment, and we develop an approach to efficient coordinated exploration that is suitable for problems of practical scale. Our approach builds on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-18 Maria Dimakopoulou , Ian Osband , Benjamin Van Roy

Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a central optimisation framework in machine learning. Although RL agents can converge to optimal solutions, the definition of ``optimality'' depends on the environment's statistical properties. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Bert Verbruggen , Arne Vanhoyweghen , Vincent Ginis

In this work, we take a first step toward elucidating the mechanisms behind emergent exploration in unsupervised reinforcement learning. We study Single-Goal Contrastive Reinforcement Learning (SGCRL), a self-supervised algorithm capable of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Mahsa Bastankhah , Grace Liu , Dilip Arumugam , Thomas L. Griffiths , Benjamin Eysenbach

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

Design time uncertainty poses an important challenge when developing a self-adaptive system. As an example, defining how the system should adapt when facing a new environment state, requires understanding the precise effect of an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Felix Feit , Andreas Metzger , Klaus Pohl

We consider a setting for Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) where the learner is extended with the ability to actively select multiple environments, observing an agent's behavior on each environment. We first demonstrate that if the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-01-26 Kareem Amin , Satinder Singh

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) for linear systems seeks a cost function whose optimal controller reproduces an expert policy from data. Existing data-driven methods for discrete-time linear systems are largely built on iterative…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-12 Duc Cuong Nguyen , Phuong Nam Dao

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to balance exploiting the current best strategy with exploring new options that could lead to higher rewards. Most common RL algorithms use undirected exploration, i.e., select random sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Bhavya Sukhija , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause , Pieter Abbeel , Carmelo Sferrazza

Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a principled framework for decision-making in partially observable environments, which can be modeled as Markov decision processes and compactly represented through dynamic decision Bayesian networks.…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-07-25 Gilberto Cunha , Alexandra Ramôa , André Sequeira , Michael de Oliveira , Luís Barbosa

Reinforcement learning (RL) is gaining attention by more and more researchers in quantitative finance as the agent-environment interaction framework is aligned with decision making process in many business problems. Most of the current…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2022-05-31 Huifang Huang , Ting Gao , Yi Gui , Jin Guo , Peng Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have proven transformative in a range of domains. To tackle real-world domains, these systems often use neural networks to learn policies directly from pixels or other high-dimensional sensory input.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Nishil Patel , Sebastian Lee , Stefano Sarao Mannelli , Sebastian Goldt , Andrew Saxe

The problem of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in an unknown nonlinear dynamical system is equivalent to the search for an optimal feedback law utilizing the simulations/ rollouts of the dynamical system. Most RL techniques search over a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-25 Ran Wang , Karthikeya S. Parunandi , Aayushman Sharma , Raman Goyal , Suman Chakravorty

Reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to tune data-driven (economic) nonlinear model predictive controllers ((e)NMPCs) for optimal performance in a specific control task by optimizing the dynamic model or parameters in the policy's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Daniel Mayfrank , Mehmet Velioglu , Alexander Mitsos , Manuel Dahmen

Current reinforcement learning (RL) often suffers when solving a challenging exploration problem where the desired outcomes or high rewards are rarely observed. Even though curriculum RL, a framework that solves complex tasks by proposing a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Daesol Cho , Seungjae Lee , H. Jin Kim

Discovering causal structure among a set of variables is a fundamental problem in many empirical sciences. Traditional score-based casual discovery methods rely on various local heuristics to search for a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Shengyu Zhu , Ignavier Ng , Zhitang Chen