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Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a prevalent and effective methodology for real-world recommender systems, enabling learning policies from historical data and capturing user preferences. In offline RL, reward shaping…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Wenzheng Shu , Yanxiang Zeng , Yongxiang Tang , Teng Sha , Ning Luo , Yanhua Cheng , Xialong Liu , Fan Zhou , Peng Jiang

Real-world applications require RL algorithms to act safely. During learning process, it is likely that the agent executes sub-optimal actions that may lead to unsafe/poor states of the system. Exploration is particularly brittle in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-17 Elena Smirnova , Elvis Dohmatob , Jérémie Mary

A reinforcement learning agent tries to maximize its cumulative payoff by interacting in an unknown environment. It is important for the agent to explore suboptimal actions as well as to pick actions with highest known rewards. Yet, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-23 Reazul Hasan Russel

Learning agents that excel at sequential decision-making tasks must continuously resolve the problem of exploration and exploitation for optimal learning. However, such interactions with the environment online might be prohibitively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Ambedkar Dukkipati , Ranga Shaarad Ayyagari , Bodhisattwa Dasgupta , Parag Dutta , Prabhas Reddy Onteru

Advancements in reinforcement learning have produced a variety of complex and useful intrinsic driving forces; crucially, these drivers operate under a direct conditioning paradigm. This form of conditioning limits our agents' capacity by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Rodney A Sanchez , Ferat Sahin , Alex Ororbia , Jamison Heard

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Vitchyr H. Pong , Rowan McAllister , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks where extrinsic rewards from environments are sparse or even totally disregarded. Significant advances based on intrinsic motivation show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Chenjia Bai , Peng Liu , Kaiyu Liu , Lingxiao Wang , Yingnan Zhao , Lei Han

Safe exploration aims at addressing the limitations of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in safety-critical scenarios, where failures during trial-and-error learning may incur high costs. Several methods exist to incorporate external knowledge or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Xiaotong Ji , Antonio Filieri

Statistical spoken dialogue systems have the attractive property of being able to be optimised from data via interactions with real users. However in the reinforcement learning paradigm the dialogue manager (agent) often requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-08-19 Pei-Hao Su , David Vandyke , Milica Gasic , Nikola Mrksic , Tsung-Hsien Wen , Steve Young

Applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems is often made challenging by the inability to interact with the environment and the difficulty of designing reward functions. Offline RL addresses the first challenge by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Alizée Pace , Bernhard Schölkopf , Gunnar Rätsch , Giorgia Ramponi

Mastering deep reinforcement learning (DRL) proves challenging in tasks featuring scant rewards. These limited rewards merely signify whether the task is partially or entirely accomplished, necessitating various exploration actions before…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang

The problem with existing camera-based Deep Reinforcement Learning approaches is twofold: they rarely integrate high-level scene context into the feature representation, and they rely on rigid, fixed reward functions. To address these…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Vinal Asodia , Iman Sharifi , Saber Fallah

We propose a framework for ensuring safe behavior of a reinforcement learning agent when the reward function may be difficult to specify. In order to do this, we rely on the existence of demonstrations from expert policies, and we provide a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-22 Jessie Huang , Fa Wu , Doina Precup , Yang Cai

In the realm of autonomous agents, ensuring safety and reliability in complex and dynamic environments remains a paramount challenge. Safe reinforcement learning addresses these concerns by introducing safety constraints, but still faces…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Hyeokjin Kwon , Gunmin Lee , Junseo Lee , Songhwai Oh

Offline Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) learns rewards and policies aligned with human preferences without the need for extensive reward engineering and direct interaction with human annotators. However, ensuring safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Ze Gong , Pradeep Varakantham , Akshat Kumar

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is suitable for safety-critical domains where online exploration is too costly or dangerous. In such safety-critical settings, decision-making should take into consideration the risk of catastrophic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Marc Rigter , Bruno Lacerda , Nick Hawes

Efficient exploration is a crucial challenge in deep reinforcement learning. Several methods, such as behavioral priors, are able to leverage offline data in order to efficiently accelerate reinforcement learning on complex tasks. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-01 Marco Bagatella , Sammy Christen , Otmar Hilliges

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

Interacting with the actual environment to acquire data is often costly and time-consuming in robotic tasks. Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a feasible solution. On the one hand, it eliminates the requirements of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Pengqin Wang , Meixin Zhu , Shaojie Shen

Identifying uncertainty and taking mitigating actions is crucial for safe and trustworthy reinforcement learning agents, especially when deployed in high-risk environments. In this paper, risk sensitivity is promoted in a model-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Stefan Radic Webster , Peter Flach