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Related papers: Learning from Scarce Experience

200 papers

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

This paper considers the problem of learning safe policies in the context of reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, we consider the notion of probabilistic safety. This is, we aim to design policies that maintain the state of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Weiqin Chen , Dharmashankar Subramanian , Santiago Paternain

Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting problem in reinforcement learning (RL). The state-of-the-art estimates the optimal action values while it usually involves an extensive search over the state-action space and unstable optimization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-27 Kaixiang Lin , Jiayu Zhou

Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) methods can successfully solve a wide range of sequential decision problems. However, learning policies that can generalize predictably across multiple tasks in a setting with non-Markovian reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Guillermo Infante , David Kuric , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez , Herke van Hoof

Learning to evaluate and improve policies is a core problem of Reinforcement Learning (RL). Traditional RL algorithms learn a value function defined for a single policy. A recently explored competitive alternative is to learn a single value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Francesco Faccio , Aditya Ramesh , Vincent Herrmann , Jean Harb , Jürgen Schmidhuber

Many real-world problems require trading off multiple competing objectives. However, these objectives are often in different units and/or scales, which can make it challenging for practitioners to express numerical preferences over…

Several recent works have been dedicated to unsupervised reinforcement learning in a single environment, in which a policy is first pre-trained with unsupervised interactions, and then fine-tuned towards the optimal policy for several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-17 Mirco Mutti , Mattia Mancassola , Marcello Restelli

We propose and study a new model for reinforcement learning with rich observations, generalizing contextual bandits to sequential decision making. These models require an agent to take actions based on observations (features) with the goal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-31 Akshay Krishnamurthy , Alekh Agarwal , John Langford

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become an increasingly active area of research in recent years. Although there are many algorithms that allow an agent to solve tasks efficiently, they often ignore the possibility that prior experience…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-01-07 Francisco M. Garcia , Chris Nota , Philip S. Thomas

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically necessitate extensive exploration of the state space to find optimal policies. However, in safety-critical applications, the risks associated with such exploration can lead to catastrophic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Kaustubh Mani , Vincent Mai , Charlie Gauthier , Annie Chen , Samer Nashed , Liam Paull

Real-world sequential decision making problems commonly involve partial observability, which requires the agent to maintain a memory of history in order to infer the latent states, plan and make good decisions. Coping with partial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-09 Yonathan Efroni , Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Sobhan Miryoosefi

In many areas, practitioners seek to use observational data to learn a treatment assignment policy that satisfies application-specific constraints, such as budget, fairness, simplicity, or other functional form constraints. For example,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-09-08 Susan Athey , Stefan Wager

Reinforcement learning algorithms are generally designed to maximize the expected return across a population. However, a policy that is optimal on average may be suboptimal for certain individuals, leading to potential safety concerns. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Jingyi Li , Peng Wu , Chengchun Shi

This article introduces an imitation learning method for learning maximum entropy policies that comply with constraints demonstrated by expert trajectories executing a task. The formulation of the method takes advantage of results…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 George Papadopoulos , George A. Vouros

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…

This work leverages adaptive social learning to estimate partially observable global states in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) problems. Unlike existing methods, the proposed approach enables the concurrent operation of social…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Ainur Zhaikhan , Malek Khammassi , Ali H. Sayed

Policies trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL) are often needlessly complex, making them difficult to analyse and interpret. In a run with $n$ time steps, a policy will make $n$ decisions on actions to take; we conjecture that only a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Hadrien Pouget , Hana Chockler , Youcheng Sun , Daniel Kroening

In some applications of reinforcement learning, a dataset of pre-collected experience is already available but it is also possible to acquire some additional online data to help improve the quality of the policy. However, it may be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Ruiqi Zhang , Andrea Zanette

Empirical researchers and decision-makers spanning various domains frequently seek profound insights into the long-term impacts of interventions. While the significance of long-term outcomes is undeniable, an overemphasis on them may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Peng Wu , Ziyu Shen , Feng Xie , Zhongyao Wang , Chunchen Liu , Yan Zeng

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Tsung-Yen Yang , Justinian Rosca , Karthik Narasimhan , Peter J. Ramadge