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Preference-based reward learning is a popular technique for teaching robots and autonomous systems how a human user wants them to perform a task. Previous works have shown that actively synthesizing preference queries to maximize…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Evan Ellis , Gaurav R. Ghosal , Stuart J. Russell , Anca Dragan , Erdem Bıyık

In reinforcement learning (RL), the ability to utilize prior knowledge from previously solved tasks can allow agents to quickly solve new problems. In some cases, these new problems may be approximately solved by composing the solutions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-02 Jacob Adamczyk , Argenis Arriojas , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

The $Q$-learning algorithm is a simple and widely-used stochastic approximation scheme for reinforcement learning, but the basic protocol can exhibit instability in conjunction with function approximation. Such instability can be observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Andrea Zanette , Martin J. Wainwright

Teaching robots novel skills with demonstrations via human-in-the-loop data collection techniques like kinesthetic teaching or teleoperation puts a heavy burden on human supervisors. In contrast to this paradigm, it is often significantly…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-04-24 Daniel Yang , Davin Tjia , Jacob Berg , Dima Damen , Pulkit Agrawal , Abhishek Gupta

Learning to produce efficient movement behaviour for humanoid robots from scratch is a hard problem, as has been illustrated by the "Learning to run" competition at NIPS 2017. The goal of this competition was to train a two-legged model of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-17 Aleksandra Malysheva , Daniel Kudenko , Aleksei Shpilman

Reward functions are difficult to design and often hard to align with human intent. Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms address these problems by learning reward functions from human feedback. However, the majority of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Joey Hejna , Dorsa Sadigh

Multi-agent reinforcement learning involves multiple agents interacting with each other and a shared environment to complete tasks. When rewards provided by the environment are sparse, agents may not receive immediate feedback on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-31 Baicen Xiao , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Radha Poovendran

Current reinforcement learning algorithms train an agent using forward-generated trajectories, which provide little guidance so that the agent can explore as much as possible. While realizing the value of reinforcement learning results from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-09-06 KyungMin Ko

Successful teaching requires an assumption of how the learner learns - how the learner uses experiences from the world to update their internal states. We investigate what expectations people have about a learner when they teach them in an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-30 Yun-Shiuan Chuang , Xuezhou Zhang , Yuzhe Ma , Mark K. Ho , Joseph L. Austerweil , Xiaojin Zhu

Prior work has proposed a simple strategy for reinforcement learning (RL): label experience with the outcomes achieved in that experience, and then imitate the relabeled experience. These outcome-conditioned imitation learning methods are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Benjamin Eysenbach , Soumith Udatha , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-06 Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou

Strategy learning in game environments with multi-agent is a challenging problem. Since each agent's reward is determined by the joint strategy, a greedy learning strategy that aims to maximize its own reward may fall into a local optimum.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Xinyu Qiao , Yudong Hu , Congying Han , Weiyan Wu , Tiande Guo

This note reconciles two seemingly distinct approaches to policy gradient optimization for the Pass@K objective in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards: (1) direct REINFORCE-style methods, and (2) advantage-shaping techniques that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Christos Thrampoulidis , Sadegh Mahdavi , Wenlong Deng

In reinforcement learning (RL), Q-learning is a fundamental algorithm whose convergence is guaranteed in the tabular setting. However, this convergence guarantee does not hold under linear function approximation. To overcome this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Hyukjun Yang , Han-Dong Lim , Donghwan Lee

In high-dimensional state spaces, the usefulness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) is limited by the problem of exploration. This issue has been addressed using potential-based reward shaping (PB-RS) previously. In the present work, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-15 Ingmar Schubert , Ozgur S. Oguz , Marc Toussaint

This paper proposes a new reinforcement learning with hyperbolic discounting. Combining a new temporal difference error with the hyperbolic discounting in recursive manner and reward-punishment framework, a new scheme to learn the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Taisuke Kobayashi

Empowerment, an information-theoretic measure of an agent's potential influence on its environment, has emerged as a powerful intrinsic motivation and exploration framework for reinforcement learning (RL). Besides for unsupervised RL and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Moritz Schneider , Robert Krug , Narunas Vaskevicius , Luigi Palmieri , Michael Volpp , Joschka Boedecker

Reward shaping is critical in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly for complex tasks where sparse rewards can hinder learning. However, choosing effective shaping rewards from a set of reward functions in a computationally efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Chen Bo Calvin Zhang , Zhang-Wei Hong , Aldo Pacchiano , Pulkit Agrawal

While contemporary reinforcement learning research and applications have embraced policy gradient methods as the panacea of solving learning problems, value-based methods can still be useful in many domains as long as we can wrangle with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Ashwin Ramaswamy , Ransalu Senanayake

Teaching agents to follow complex written instructions has been an important yet elusive goal. One technique for enhancing learning efficiency is language reward shaping (LRS). Within a reinforcement learning (RL) framework, LRS involves…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Sukai Huang , Nir Lipovetzky , Trevor Cohn