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This paper establishes a rigorous connection between regularized discrete-time reinforcement learning (RL) and continuous-time stochastic optimal control. Specifically, classical RL algorithms are typically solving a regularized…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-24 Huyên Pham , Yuming Paul Zhang , Yuhua Zhu

Most reinforcement learning (RL) methods only focus on learning a single task from scratch and are not able to use prior knowledge to learn other tasks more effectively. Context-based meta RL techniques are recently proposed as a possible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Xu Han , Feng Wu

Safety is critical when applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. As a result, safe RL has emerged as a fundamental and powerful paradigm for optimizing an agent's policy while incorporating notions of safety. A prevalent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Akifumi Wachi , Xun Shen , Yanan Sui

In reinforcement learning, an agent learns to reach a set of goals by means of an external reward signal. In the natural world, intelligent organisms learn from internal drives, bypassing the need for external signals, which is beneficial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Rui Zhao , Yang Gao , Pieter Abbeel , Volker Tresp , Wei Xu

How can we design good goals for arbitrarily intelligent agents? Reinforcement learning (RL) is a natural approach. Unfortunately, RL does not work well for generally intelligent agents, as RL agents are incentivised to shortcut the reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-05-11 Tom Everitt , Marcus Hutter

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central problem in artificial intelligence. This problem consists of defining artificial agents that can learn optimal behaviour by interacting with an environment -- where the optimal behaviour is defined…

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

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in various domains, yet it often relies on carefully designed programmatic reward functions to guide agent behavior. Designing such reward functions can be challenging and may not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Qi Wang , Mian Wu , Yuyang Zhang , Mingqi Yuan , Wenyao Zhang , Haoxiang You , Yunbo Wang , Xin Jin , Xiaokang Yang , Wenjun Zeng

This research delves deeply into Meta Reinforcement Learning (Meta RL) through a exploration focusing on defining generalization limits and ensuring convergence. By employing a approach this article introduces an innovative theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Cangqing Wang , Mingxiu Sui , Dan Sun , Zecheng Zhang , Yan Zhou

We study the problem of safe offline reinforcement learning (RL), the goal is to learn a policy that maximizes long-term reward while satisfying safety constraints given only offline data, without further interaction with the environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Haoran Xu , Xianyuan Zhan , Xiangyu Zhu

Inferring reward functions from demonstrations and pairwise preferences are auspicious approaches for aligning Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents with human intentions. However, state-of-the art methods typically focus on learning a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Markus Peschl , Arkady Zgonnikov , Frans A. Oliehoek , Luciano C. Siebert

Sparse reward problems are one of the biggest challenges in Reinforcement Learning. Goal-directed tasks are one such sparse reward problems where a reward signal is received only when the goal is reached. One promising way to train an agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Ameet Deshpande , Srikanth Sarma , Ashutosh Jha , Balaraman Ravindran

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Kianté Brantley , Hal Daumé , Miroslav Dudik , Robert Schapire

Training a deep neural network to maximize a target objective has become the standard recipe for successful machine learning over the last decade. These networks can be optimized with supervised learning, if the target objective is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Bernhard Jaeger , Andreas Geiger

Approaches for goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) often use learned state representations to extract goal-reaching policies. Two frameworks for representation structure have yielded particularly effective GCRL algorithms: (1)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Vivek Myers , Bill Chunyuan Zheng , Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine

Some researchers speculate that intelligent reinforcement learning (RL) agents would be incentivized to seek resources and power in pursuit of their objectives. Other researchers point out that RL agents need not have human-like…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Alexander Matt Turner , Logan Smith , Rohin Shah , Andrew Critch , Prasad Tadepalli

To date, distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) methods have exclusively focused on the discounted setting, where an agent aims to optimize a discounted sum of rewards over time. In this work, we extend distributional RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Juan Sebastian Rojas , Chi-Guhn Lee

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have emerged as a popular choice for training an efficient and effective dialogue policy. However, these methods suffer from sparse and unstable reward signals returned by a user simulator only when a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-18 Ziming Li , Sungjin Lee , Baolin Peng , Jinchao Li , Julia Kiseleva , Maarten de Rijke , Shahin Shayandeh , Jianfeng Gao

Unsupervised pre-training has recently become the bedrock for computer vision and natural language processing. In reinforcement learning (RL), goal-conditioned RL can potentially provide an analogous self-supervised approach for making use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Seohong Park , Dibya Ghosh , Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically start tabula rasa, without any prior knowledge of the environment, and without any prior skills. This however often leads to low sample efficiency, requiring a large amount of interaction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-13 Matthias Hutsebaut-Buysse , Kevin Mets , Steven Latré