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Imitation learning seeks to learn an expert policy from sampled demonstrations. However, in the real world, it is often difficult to find a perfect expert and avoiding dangerous behaviors becomes relevant for safety reasons. We present the…
Training novice users to operate an excavator for learning different skills requires the presence of expert teachers. Considering the complexity of the problem, it is comparatively expensive to find skilled experts as the process is…
Aligning large language models to human preferences is inherently multidimensional, yet most pipelines collapse heterogeneous signals into a single optimizeable objective. We seek to answer what it would take to simultaneously align a model…
This paper investigates estimating the variance of a temporal-difference learning agent's update target. Most reinforcement learning methods use an estimate of the value function, which captures how good it is for the agent to be in a…
Many Reinforcement Learning algorithms assume a Markov reward function to guarantee optimality. However, not all reward functions are Markov. This paper proposes a framework for mapping non-Markov reward functions into equivalent Markov…
Contextual bandit learning is a reinforcement learning problem where the learner repeatedly receives a set of features (context), takes an action and receives a reward based on the action and context. We consider this problem under a…
Reward shaping has been applied widely to accelerate Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents' training. However, a principled way of designing effective reward shaping functions, especially for complex continuous control problems, remains…
Recent advances in recommender systems have shown that user-system interaction essentially formulates long-term optimization problems, and online reinforcement learning can be adopted to improve recommendation performance. The general…
In mechanism design it is typical to impose incentive compatibility and then derive an optimal mechanism subject to this constraint. By replacing the incentive compatibility requirement with the goal of minimizing expected ex post regret,…
A misspecified reward can degrade sample efficiency and induce undesired behaviors in reinforcement learning (RL) problems. We propose symbolic reward machines for incorporating high-level task knowledge when specifying the reward signals.…
Standard regression techniques, while powerful, are often constrained by predefined, differentiable loss functions such as mean squared error. These functions may not fully capture the desired behavior of a system, especially when dealing…
Agents that can learn to imitate given video observation -- \emph{without direct access to state or action information} are more applicable to learning in the natural world. However, formulating a reinforcement learning (RL) agent that…
Reward models (RMs) are crucial for the training and inference-time scaling up of large language models (LLMs). However, existing reward models primarily focus on human preferences, neglecting verifiable correctness signals which have shown…
Reward functions, learned or manually specified, are rarely perfect. Instead of accurately expressing human goals, these reward functions are often distorted by human beliefs about how best to achieve those goals. Specifically, these reward…
Most learning algorithms are not invariant to the scale of the function that is being approximated. We propose to adaptively normalize the targets used in learning. This is useful in value-based reinforcement learning, where the magnitude…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves final-answer accuracy on reasoning tasks, but it does not reliably improve reasoning quality. Because outcome rewards only assess final answers, they also reward spurious…
Specifying reward functions for robots that operate in environments without a natural reward signal can be challenging, and incorrectly specified rewards can incentivise degenerate or dangerous behavior. A promising alternative to manually…
We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…
Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…
This paper develops an inverse reinforcement learning algorithm aimed at recovering a reward function from the observed actions of an agent. We introduce a strategy to flexibly handle different types of actions with two approximations of…