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Multi-goal reinforcement learning (RL) aims to qualify the agent to accomplish multi-goal tasks, which is of great importance in learning scalable robotic manipulation skills. However, reward engineering always requires strenuous efforts in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Deyu Yang , Hanbo Zhang , Xuguang Lan , Jishiyu Ding

Learning from rewards (i.e., reinforcement learning or RL) and learning to imitate a teacher (i.e., teacher-student learning) are two established approaches for solving sequential decision-making problems. To combine the benefits of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Idan Shenfeld , Zhang-Wei Hong , Aviv Tamar , Pulkit Agrawal

In constrained reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to not only optimize the overall reward but also satisfy the additional safety, diversity, or budget constraints. Consequently, existing constrained RL solutions require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Chi Jin

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a learning paradigm concerned with learning to control a system so as to maximize an objective over the long term. This approach to learning has received immense interest in recent times and success manifests…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-07-26 Sanyam Kapoor

While reinforcement learning provides an appealing formalism for learning individual skills, a general-purpose robotic system must be able to master an extensive repertoire of behaviors. Instead of learning a large collection of skills…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-10-28 Ashvin Nair , Shikhar Bahl , Alexander Khazatsky , Vitchyr Pong , Glen Berseth , Sergey Levine

Unsupervised pretraining has driven empirical advances in goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL), but its theoretical foundations remain poorly understood. In particular, an influential class of methods, mutual information skill…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Alireza Modirshanechi , Benjamin Eysenbach , Peter Dayan , Eric Schulz

Reinforcement learning has seen increasing applications in real-world contexts over the past few years. However, physical environments are often imperfect and policies that perform well in simulation might not achieve the same performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Carlos Purves , Pietro Liò , Cătălina Cangea

While reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to enable robots to autonomously acquire a wide range of skills, in practice, RL usually requires manual, per-task engineering of reward functions, especially in real world settings where…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-02-15 Tianhe Yu , Gleb Shevchuk , Dorsa Sadigh , Chelsea Finn

In this work, we address the problem of determining reliable policies in reinforcement learning (RL), with a focus on optimization under uncertainty and the need for performance guarantees. While classical RL algorithms aim at maximizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Nadir Farhi

Generalization in Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to learn an agent during training that generalizes to the target environment. This paper studies RL generalization from a theoretical aspect: how much can we expect pre-training over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-30 Haotian Ye , Xiaoyu Chen , Liwei Wang , Simon S. Du

Meta reinforcement learning (RL) allows agents to leverage experience across a distribution of tasks on which the agent can train at will, enabling faster learning of optimal policies on new test tasks. Despite its success in improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Tingting Ni , Maryam Kamgarpour

Reinforcement learning (RL) can be highly effective at learning goal-reaching policies, but it typically does not provide formal guarantees that the goal will always be reached. A common approach to provide formal goal-reaching guarantees…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Mehdi Heydari Shahna , Seyed Adel Alizadeh Kolagar , Jouni Mattila

A common formulation of constrained reinforcement learning involves multiple rewards that must individually accumulate to given thresholds. In this class of problems, we show a simple example in which the desired optimal policy cannot be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-22 Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Santiago Paternain , Luiz F. O. Chamon , Alejandro Ribeiro

Constrained Reinforcement Learning has been employed to enforce safety constraints on policy through the use of expected cost constraints. The key challenge is in handling expected cost accumulated using the policy and not just in a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Hao Jiang , Tien Mai , Pradeep Varakantham , Minh Huy Hoang

The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-25 Wuxia Chen , Taposh Banerjee , Jemin George , Carl Busart

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents have great successes in solving tasks with large observation and action spaces from limited feedback. Still, training the agents is data-intensive and there are no guarantees that the learned behavior is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Helge Spieker

We study deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with delayed rewards. In many real-world tasks, instant rewards are often not readily accessible or even defined immediately after the agent performs actions. In this work, we first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Beining Han , Zhizhou Ren , Zuofan Wu , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng

We study the problem of representation learning in goal-conditioned hierarchical reinforcement learning. In such hierarchical structures, a higher-level controller solves tasks by iteratively communicating goals which a lower-level policy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-01-10 Ofir Nachum , Shixiang Gu , Honglak Lee , Sergey Levine

Although reinforcement learning (RL) can provide reliable solutions in many settings, practitioners are often wary of the discrepancies between the RL solution and their status quo procedures. Therefore, they may be reluctant to adapt to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Mohammadreza Nazari , Majid Jahani , Lawrence V. Snyder , Martin Takáč

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved significant success in solving single-goal tasks. However, uniform goal selection often results in sample inefficiency in multi-goal settings where agents must learn a universal goal-conditioned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera