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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

We propose a distributional framework for offline Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) that jointly models uncertainty over reward functions and full distributions of returns. Unlike conventional IRL approaches that recover a deterministic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Feiyang Wu , Ye Zhao , Anqi Wu

Designing rewards for Reinforcement Learning (RL) is challenging because it needs to convey the desired task, be efficient to optimize, and be easy to compute. The latter is particularly problematic when applying RL to robotics, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-28 Yiming Ding , Carlos Florensa , Mariano Phielipp , Pieter Abbeel

In model-based reinforcement learning, the agent interleaves between model learning and planning. These two components are inextricably intertwined. If the model is not able to provide sensible long-term prediction, the executed planner…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-19 Nan Rosemary Ke , Amanpreet Singh , Ahmed Touati , Anirudh Goyal , Yoshua Bengio , Devi Parikh , Dhruv Batra

Despite the fact that deep reinforcement learning (RL) has surpassed human-level performances in various tasks, it still has several fundamental challenges. First, most RL methods require intensive data from the exploration of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Zhe Xu , Bo Wu , Aditya Ojha , Daniel Neider , Ufuk Topcu

We study how to effectively leverage expert feedback to learn sequential decision-making policies. We focus on problems with sparse rewards and long time horizons, which typically pose significant challenges in reinforcement learning. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-12 Hoang M. Le , Nan Jiang , Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudík , Yisong Yue , Hal Daumé

This paper proposes a safe reinforcement learning (RL) framework based on forward-invariance-induced action-space design. The control problem is cast as a Markov decision process, but instead of relying on runtime shielding or penalty-based…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-10 Chieh Tsai , Muhammad Junayed Hasan Zahed , Salim Hariri , Hossein Rastgoftar

Large language models (LLMs) tackle complex tasks by generating long chains of thought or "reasoning traces" that act as latent variables in the generation of an output given a query. A model's ability to generate such traces can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Alexander Gurung , Nikolay Malkin , Mirella Lapata

Reward specification plays a central role in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding the agent's behavior. To express non-Markovian rewards, formalisms such as reward machines have been introduced to capture dependencies on histories. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Rajarshi Roy , Anirban Majumdar , Ritam Raha , David Parker , Marta Kwiatkowska

Modeling of real-world biological multi-agents is a fundamental problem in various scientific and engineering fields. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework to generate flexible and diverse behaviors in cyberspace; however,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Keisuke Fujii , Kazushi Tsutsui , Atom Scott , Hiroshi Nakahara , Naoya Takeishi , Yoshinobu Kawahara

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework under a broad class of risk objectives, characterized by convex scoring functions. This class covers many common risk measures, such as variance, Expected Shortfall, entropic Value-at-Risk,…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-05-16 Shanyu Han , Yang Liu , Xiang Yu

Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to simultaneously learn policies for solving many tasks. Several prior works have found that relabeling past experience with different reward functions can improve sample efficiency. Relabeling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Benjamin Eysenbach , Xinyang Geng , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Solving long-horizon, temporally-extended tasks using Reinforcement Learning (RL) is challenging, compounded by the common practice of learning without prior knowledge (or tabula rasa learning). Humans can generate and execute plans with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Bharat Prakash , Tim Oates , Tinoosh Mohsenin

Inverse reinforcement learning has proved its ability to explain state-action trajectories of expert agents by recovering their underlying reward functions in increasingly challenging environments. Recent advances in adversarial learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-10 Jacobo Roa-Vicens , Yuanbo Wang , Virgile Mison , Yarin Gal , Ricardo Silva

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

Open-domain dialog generation is a challenging problem; maximum likelihood training can lead to repetitive outputs, models have difficulty tracking long-term conversational goals, and training on standard movie or online datasets may lead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-03 Abdelrhman Saleh , Natasha Jaques , Asma Ghandeharioun , Judy Hanwen Shen , Rosalind Picard

We present a data-efficient framework for solving sequential decision-making problems which exploits the combination of reinforcement learning (RL) and latent variable generative models. The framework, called GenRL, trains deep policies by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-20 Ali Ghadirzadeh , Petra Poklukar , Karol Arndt , Chelsea Finn , Ville Kyrki , Danica Kragic , Mårten Björkman

The deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) in the real world comes with challenges in calibrating user trust and expectations. As a step toward developing RL systems that are able to communicate their competencies, we present a method of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Aastha Acharya , Rebecca Russell , Nisar R. Ahmed

Ensuring that reinforcement learning (RL) controllers satisfy safety and reliability constraints in real-world settings remains challenging: state-avoidance and constrained Markov decision processes often fail to capture trajectory-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Alper Kamil Bozkurt , Calin Belta , Ming C. Lin

Recent research has employed reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to optimize long-term user engagement in recommender systems, thereby avoiding common pitfalls such as user boredom and filter bubbles. They capture the sequential and…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-01-25 Romain Deffayet , Thibaut Thonet , Jean-Michel Renders , Maarten de Rijke