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While Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to train an agent from a reward function in a given environment, Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) seeks to recover the reward function from observing an expert's behavior. It is well known that, in…
Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…
In reinforcement learning episodes, the rewards and punishments are often non-deterministic, and there are invariably stochastic elements governing the underlying situation. Such stochastic elements are often numerous and cannot be known in…
In the last decade, Deep Reinforcement Learning has evolved into a powerful tool for complex sequential decision-making problems. It combines deep learning's proficiency in processing rich input signals with reinforcement learning's…
In reinforcement learning (RL), agents sequentially interact with changing environments while aiming to maximize the obtained rewards. Usually, rewards are observed only after acting, and so the goal is to maximize the expected cumulative…
Reward functions are easy to misspecify; although designers can make corrections after observing mistakes, an agent pursuing a misspecified reward function can irreversibly change the state of its environment. If that change precludes…
In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…
Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) algorithms extend conventional reinforcement learning (RL) to the more general case of problems with multiple, conflicting objectives, represented by vector-valued rewards. Widely-used scalar RL…
Spurious correlations in a reward model's training data can prevent Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) from identifying the desired goal and induce unwanted behaviors. This paper shows that offline RLHF is susceptible to…
Appropriate credit assignment for delay rewards is a fundamental challenge for reinforcement learning. To tackle this problem, we introduce a delay reward calibration paradigm inspired from a classification perspective. We hypothesize that…
Although recent model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have been shown to be capable of mastering complicated decision-making tasks, the sample complexity of these methods has remained a hurdle to utilizing them in many real-world…
Training language models via reinforcement learning often relies on imperfect proxy rewards, since ground truth rewards that precisely define the intended behavior are rarely available. Standard metrics for assessing the quality of proxy…
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…
Reinforcement learning (RL) combines a control problem with statistical estimation: The system dynamics are not known to the agent, but can be learned through experience. A recent line of research casts `RL as inference' and suggests a…
We study the problem of experiment planning with function approximation in contextual bandit problems. In settings where there is a significant overhead to deploying adaptive algorithms -- for example, when the execution of the data…
Preference-based learning of reward functions, where the reward function is learned using comparison data, has been well studied for complex robotic tasks such as autonomous driving. Existing algorithms have focused on learning reward…
Discounted reinforcement learning is fundamentally incompatible with function approximation for control in continuing tasks. It is not an optimization problem in its usual formulation, so when using function approximation there is no…
Reinforcement learning (RL) requires access to a reward function that incentivizes the right behavior, but these are notoriously hard to specify for complex tasks. Preference-based RL provides an alternative: learning policies using a…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of inferring the reward function of an agent, given its policy or observed behavior. Analogous to RL, IRL is perceived both as a problem and as a class of methods. By categorically…
In this theoretical paper we are concerned with the problem of learning a value function by a smooth general function approximator, to solve a deterministic episodic control problem in a large continuous state space. It is shown that…