English
Related papers

Related papers: Trust the Batch, On- or Off-Policy: Adaptive Polic…

200 papers

Primal-dual safe RL methods commonly perform iterations between the primal update of the policy and the dual update of the Lagrange Multiplier. Such a training paradigm is highly susceptible to the error in cumulative cost estimation since…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Zifan Wu , Bo Tang , Qian Lin , Chao Yu , Shangqin Mao , Qianlong Xie , Xingxing Wang , Dong Wang

Model-based reinforcement learning promises to learn an optimal policy from fewer interactions with the environment compared to model-free reinforcement learning by learning an intermediate model of the environment in order to predict…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-08 Abhinav Bhatia , Philip S. Thomas , Shlomo Zilberstein

Meta-reinforcement learning (RL) methods can meta-train policies that adapt to new tasks with orders of magnitude less data than standard RL, but meta-training itself is costly and time-consuming. If we can meta-train on offline data, then…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-08 Vitchyr H. Pong , Ashvin Nair , Laura Smith , Catherine Huang , Sergey Levine

Deep reinforcement learning can learn effective policies for a wide range of tasks, but is notoriously difficult to use due to instability and sensitivity to hyperparameters. The reasons for this remain unclear. When using standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-17 Aviral Kumar , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine

Batch Reinforcement Learning (Batch RL) consists in training a policy using trajectories collected with another policy, called the behavioural policy. Safe policy improvement (SPI) provides guarantees with high probability that the trained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-12 Kimia Nadjahi , Romain Laroche , Rémi Tachet des Combes

Training a reinforcement learning agent on-policy means collecting fresh experience at every update, and that experience comes with a hidden problem. Each state in a rollout is the direct output of the previous one, causally chained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Ajhesh Basnet

A reinforcement learning (RL) control policy could fail in a new/perturbed environment that is different from the training environment, due to the presence of dynamic variations. For controlling systems with continuous state and action…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-08-31 Y. Cheng , P. Zhao , F. Wang , D. J. Block , N. Hovakimyan

In reinforcement learning, robust policies for high-stakes decision-making problems with limited data are usually computed by optimizing the percentile criterion, which minimizes the probability of a catastrophic failure. Unfortunately,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Elita A. Lobo , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Marek Petrik

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often learn policies that achieve the same episodic return yet behave very differently, due to a combination of environmental (random transitions, initial conditions, reward noise) and algorithmic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Dennis Jabs , Aditya Mohan , Marius Lindauer

Reliable uncertainty quantification is crucial for reinforcement learning (RL) in high-stakes settings. We propose a unified conformal prediction framework for infinite-horizon policy evaluation that constructs distribution-free prediction…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-31 Feichen Gan , Youcun Lu , Yingying Zhang , Yukun Liu

Adaptive robust optimization (ARO) extends static robust optimization by allowing decisions to depend on the realized uncertainty - weakly dominating static solutions within the modeled uncertainty set. However, ARO makes previous…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-20 Karl Zhu , Dimitris Bertsimas

Adapting language models (LMs) to new tasks via post-training carries the risk of degrading existing capabilities -- a phenomenon classically known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, toward identifying guidelines for mitigating this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Howard Chen , Noam Razin , Karthik Narasimhan , Danqi Chen

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated promising results on complex tasks, yet often require impractical numbers of samples since they learn from scratch. Meta-RL aims to address this challenge by leveraging experience…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-28 Russell Mendonca , Abhishek Gupta , Rosen Kralev , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

The goal of robust reinforcement learning (RL) is to learn a policy that is robust against the uncertainty in model parameters. Parameter uncertainty commonly occurs in many real-world RL applications due to simulator modeling errors,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Kishan Panaganti , Zaiyan Xu , Dileep Kalathil , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

We investigate reinforcement learning (RL) in the presence of distributional mismatch between training and deployment, where policies trained in simulators often underperform in practice due to mismatches between training and deployment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Debamita Ghosh , George K. Atia , Yue Wang

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved great empirical successes in various domains. However, the large search space of neural networks requires a large amount of data, which makes the current RL algorithms not sample efficient.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Qianli Shen , Yan Li , Haoming Jiang , Zhaoran Wang , Tuo Zhao

Reinforcement learning (RL) yields substantial improvements in large language models (LLMs) downstream task performance and alignment with human values. Surprisingly, such large gains result from updating only a small subnetwork comprising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Sagnik Mukherjee , Lifan Yuan , Dilek Hakkani-Tur , Hao Peng

Building deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents that find a good policy with few samples has proven notoriously challenging. To achieve sample efficiency, recent work has explored updating neural networks with large numbers of gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Claas A Voelcker , Marcel Hussing , Eric Eaton , Amir-massoud Farahmand , Igor Gilitschenski

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn an individual task. While in principle meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms enable agents to learn new skills from small amounts of experience,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-21 Kate Rakelly , Aurick Zhou , Deirdre Quillen , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems typically optimize scalar reward functions that assume precise and reliable evaluation of outcomes. However, real-world objectives--especially those derived from human preferences--are often uncertain,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Disha Singha