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Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) generally suffers from poor sample complexity, mostly due to the need to exhaustively explore the state-action space to find well-performing policies. On the other hand, we postulate that expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-13 Loris Di Natale , Bratislav Svetozarevic , Philipp Heer , Colin N. Jones

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for decision-making in uncertain environments, but it often requires large amounts of data to learn an optimal policy. We address this challenge by incorporating prior model knowledge to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 J. S. van Hulst , W. P. M. H. Heemels , D. J. Antunes

In this work, we study model-based reinforcement learning (RL) in unknown stabilizable linear dynamical systems. When learning a dynamical system, one needs to stabilize the unknown dynamics in order to avoid system blow-ups. We propose an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-06 Sahin Lale , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Babak Hassibi , Anima Anandkumar

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has gained widespread adoption in recent years but faces significant challenges, particularly in unknown and complex environments. Among these, high-dimensional action selection stands out as a critical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-08 Wenbo Zhang , Hengrui Cai

Offline policy learning is aimed at learning decision-making policies using existing datasets of trajectories without collecting additional data. The primary motivation for using reinforcement learning (RL) instead of supervised learning…

Learning to solve tasks from a sparse reward signal is a major challenge for standard reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. However, in the real world, agents rarely need to solve sparse reward tasks entirely from scratch. More often, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-22 Qiyang Li , Jason Zhang , Dibya Ghosh , Amy Zhang , Sergey Levine

We design a new iterative algorithm, called REINFORCE-OPT, for solving a general type of optimization problems. This algorithm parameterizes the solution search rule and iteratively updates the parameter using a reinforcement learning (RL)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-27 Chen Xu , Yun-Bin Zhao , Zhipeng Lu , Ye Zhang

In many practical applications of RL, it is expensive to observe state transitions from the environment. For example, in the problem of plasma control for nuclear fusion, computing the next state for a given state-action pair requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Viraj Mehta , Biswajit Paria , Jeff Schneider , Stefano Ermon , Willie Neiswanger

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

Reinforcement Learning and, recently, Deep Reinforcement Learning are popular methods for solving sequential decision-making problems modeled as Markov Decision Processes. RL modeling of a problem and selecting algorithms and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Reza Refaei Afshar , Joaquin Vanschoren , Uzay Kaymak , Rui Zhang , Yaoxin Wu , Wen Song , Yingqian Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is ubiquitous in the development of modern AI systems. However, state-of-the-art RL agents require extensive, and potentially unsafe, interactions with their environments to learn effectively. These limitations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Yarden As , Bhavya Sukhija , Lenart Treven , Carmelo Sferrazza , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause

Exploration is an essential component of reinforcement learning algorithms, where agents need to learn how to predict and control unknown and often stochastic environments. Reinforcement learning agents depend crucially on exploration to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Susan Amin , Maziar Gomrokchi , Harsh Satija , Herke van Hoof , Doina Precup

Optimal setting of several hyper-parameters in machine learning algorithms is key to make the most of available data. To this aim, several methods such as evolutionary strategies, random search, Bayesian optimization and heuristic rules of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-16 Juan Cruz Barsce , Jorge A. Palombarini , Ernesto C. Martínez

Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) leverages both pre-trained offline policies and online policies trained for downstream tasks, aiming to improve data efficiency and accelerate performance enhancement. An existing approach,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 JaeYoon Kim , Junyu Xuan , Christy Liang , Farookh Hussain

Urban autonomous driving decision making is challenging due to complex road geometry and multi-agent interactions. Current decision making methods are mostly manually designing the driving policy, which might result in sub-optimal solutions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Jianyu Chen , Bodi Yuan , Masayoshi Tomizuka

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to learn optimal decisions in unknown environments through experience of taking actions and observing the rewards gained. In some cases, the environment is not influenced by the actions of the RL…

The paradigm of decision-making has been revolutionised by reinforcement learning and deep learning. Although this has led to significant progress in domains such as robotics, healthcare, and finance, the use of RL in practice is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Daqian Shao

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are known to scale poorly to environments with many available actions, requiring numerous samples to learn an optimal policy. The traditional approach of considering the same fixed action space in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-15 Leo Ardon , Alberto Pozanco , Daniel Borrajo , Sumitra Ganesh

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems over general state and action spaces are notoriously challenging. In contrast to the tableau setting, one can not enumerate all the states and then iteratively update the policies for each state. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Xinran Liang , Katherine Shu , Kimin Lee , Pieter Abbeel