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Transfer reinforcement learning aims to improve the sample efficiency of solving unseen new tasks by leveraging experiences obtained from previous tasks. We consider the setting where all tasks (MDPs) share the same environment dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-08 Kaige Yang

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is more sample efficient than model-free RL by using imaginary trajectories generated by the learned dynamics model. When the model is inaccurate or biased, imaginary trajectories may be deleterious…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-12 Wenzhen Huang , Qiyue Yin , Junge Zhang , Kaiqi Huang

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms can compute policy gradients given sampled environment transitions, but require large amounts of data. In contrast, model-based methods can use the learned model to generate new data, but model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Lukas P. Fröhlich , Maksym Lefarov , Melanie N. Zeilinger , Felix Berkenkamp

We present an online model-based reinforcement learning algorithm suitable for controlling complex robotic systems directly in the real world. Unlike prevailing sim-to-real pipelines that rely on extensive offline simulation and model-free…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Fang Nan , Hao Ma , Qinghua Guan , Josie Hughes , Michael Muehlebach , Marco Hutter

We consider episodic reinforcement learning in reward-mixing Markov decision processes (RMMDPs): at the beginning of every episode nature randomly picks a latent reward model among $M$ candidates and an agent interacts with the MDP…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-07 Jeongyeol Kwon , Yonathan Efroni , Constantine Caramanis , Shie Mannor

Policy robustness in Reinforcement Learning may not be desirable at any cost: the alterations caused by robustness requirements from otherwise optimal policies should be explainable, quantifiable and formally verifiable. In this work we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Daniel Jarne Ornia , Licio Romao , Lewis Hammond , Manuel Mazo , Alessandro Abate

Model-based reinforcement learning methods often use learning only for the purpose of estimating an approximate dynamics model, offloading the rest of the decision-making work to classical trajectory optimizers. While conceptually simple,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-22 Michael Janner , Yilun Du , Joshua B. Tenenbaum , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

The optimal objective is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how policies are evaluated and optimized. While total return maximization is the ideal objective in RL, discounted return maximization is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Shuyu Yin , Fei Wen , Peilin Liu , Tao Luo

Model-based reinforcement learning approaches carry the promise of being data efficient. However, due to challenges in learning dynamics models that sufficiently match the real-world dynamics, they struggle to achieve the same asymptotic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-17 Ignasi Clavera , Jonas Rothfuss , John Schulman , Yasuhiro Fujita , Tamim Asfour , Pieter Abbeel

Reward machines are an established tool for dealing with reinforcement learning problems in which rewards are sparse and depend on complex sequences of actions. However, existing algorithms for learning reward machines assume an overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jan Corazza , Ivan Gavran , Daniel Neider

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) has gained much attention for its ability to learn complex behaviors in a sample-efficient way: planning actions by generating imaginary trajectories with predicted rewards. Despite its success, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Vint Lee , Pieter Abbeel , Youngwoon Lee

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) learns optimal policies from fixed datasets, training a policy once and deploying it at inference time without further refinement. Inspired by model predictive control (MPC), we introduce an inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Rohan Deb , Stephen J. Wright , Arindam Banerjee

End-to-end multi-task dialogue systems are usually designed with separate modules for the dialogue pipeline. Among these, the policy module is essential for deciding what to do in response to user input. This policy is trained by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-27 Navin Kamuni , Hardik Shah , Sathishkumar Chintala , Naveen Kunchakuri , Sujatha Alla Old Dominion

Reinforcement learning usually uses the feedback rewards of environmental to train agents. But the rewards in the actual environment are sparse, and even some environments will not rewards. Most of the current methods are difficult to get…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-13 Kai Jiang , XiaoLong Qin

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a predominant technique to align language models (LMs) with human preferences or promote outputs which are deemed to be desirable by a given reward function. Standard RL approaches optimize average…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Stephen Zhao , Aidan Li , Rob Brekelmans , Roger Grosse

This paper bridges some of the gap between optimal planning and reinforcement learning (RL), both of which share roots in dynamic programming applied to sequential decision making or optimal control. Whereas planning typically favors…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Filip V. Georgiev , Kalle G. Timperi , Başak Sakçak , Steven M. LaValle

Exogenous state variables and rewards can slow reinforcement learning by injecting uncontrolled variation into the reward signal. This paper formalizes exogenous state variables and rewards and shows that if the reward function decomposes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 George Trimponias , Thomas G. Dietterich

We study the problem of learning exploration-exploitation strategies that effectively adapt to dynamic environments, where the task may change over time. While RNN-based policies could in principle represent such strategies, in practice…

Finding optimal policies which maximize long term rewards of Markov Decision Processes requires the use of dynamic programming and backward induction to solve the Bellman optimality equation. However, many real-world problems require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal