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Transparency and explainability are important features that responsible autonomous vehicles should possess, particularly when interacting with humans, and causal reasoning offers a strong basis to provide these qualities. However, even if…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Rhys Howard , Nick Hawes , Lars Kunze

Reinforcement learning provides a general framework for flexible decision making and control, but requires extensive data collection for each new task that an agent needs to learn. In other machine learning fields, such as natural language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Avi Singh , Huihan Liu , Gaoyue Zhou , Albert Yu , Nicholas Rhinehart , Sergey Levine

Well-designed dense reward functions in robot manipulation not only indicate whether a task is completed but also encode progress along the way. Generally, designing dense rewards is challenging and usually requires access to privileged…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Pierre Krack , Tobias Jülg , Wolfram Burgard , Florian Walter

In some agent designs like inverse reinforcement learning an agent needs to learn its own reward function. Learning the reward function and optimising for it are typically two different processes, usually performed at different stages. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-04-29 Stuart Armstrong , Jan Leike , Laurent Orseau , Shane Legg

Reinforcement learning (RL), a common tool in decision making, learns control policies from various experiences based on the associated cumulative return/rewards without treating them differently. Humans, on the contrary, often learn to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-04 Yongchao Huang

This paper describes an application of reinforcement learning to the mention detection task. We define a novel action-based formulation for the mention detection task, in which a model can flexibly revise past labeling decisions by grouping…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-03-14 Georgiana Dinu , Wael Hamza , Radu Florian

Successfully navigating a complex environment to obtain a desired outcome is a difficult task, that up to recently was believed to be capable only by humans. This perception has been broken down over time, especially with the introduction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Joshua Hare

In the learning from demonstration (LfD) paradigm, understanding and evaluating the demonstrated behaviors plays a critical role in extracting control policies for robots. Without this knowledge, a robot may infer incorrect reward functions…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Aniruddh G. Puranic , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh , Stefanos Nikolaidis

Image-based reinforcement learning (RL) faces significant challenges in generalization when the visual environment undergoes substantial changes between training and deployment. Under such circumstances, learned policies may not perform…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-25 Weiyao Wang , Xinyuan Fang , Gregory D. Hager

Discovering and exploiting the causal structure in the environment is a crucial challenge for intelligent agents. Here we explore whether causal reasoning can emerge via meta-reinforcement learning. We train a recurrent network with…

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is computationally challenging, with common approaches requiring the solution of multiple reinforcement learning (RL) sub-problems. This work motivates the use of potential-based reward shaping to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Lauren H. Cooke , Harvey Klyne , Edwin Zhang , Cassidy Laidlaw , Milind Tambe , Finale Doshi-Velez

We study the problem of computer-assisted teaching with explanations. Conventional approaches for machine teaching typically only provide feedback at the instance level e.g., the category or label of the instance. However, it is intuitive…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-02-21 Oisin Mac Aodha , Shihan Su , Yuxin Chen , Pietro Perona , Yisong Yue

We study the problem of reinforcement learning for a task encoded by a reward machine. The task is defined over a set of properties in the environment, called atomic propositions, and represented by Boolean variables. One unrealistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Christos Verginis , Cevahir Koprulu , Sandeep Chinchali , Ufuk Topcu

Traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems depend on an exhaustive simulation environment that models real-world physics of the problem and trains the RL agent by observing this environment. In this paper, we present a novel approach…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-09-17 Dattaraj Rao

The potential of reinforcement learning (RL) to deliver aligned and performant agents is partially bottlenecked by the reward engineering problem. One alternative to heuristic trial-and-error is preference-based RL (PbRL), where a reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Tom Bewley , Freddy Lecue

Reward learning enables the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to tasks where reward is defined by human judgment, building a model of reward by asking humans questions. Most work on reward learning has used simulated environments,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Daniel M. Ziegler , Nisan Stiennon , Jeffrey Wu , Tom B. Brown , Alec Radford , Dario Amodei , Paul Christiano , Geoffrey Irving

We consider the problem of imitation learning from a finite set of expert trajectories, without access to reinforcement signals. The classical approach of extracting the expert's reward function via inverse reinforcement learning, followed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Ruohan Wang , Carlo Ciliberto , Pierluigi Amadori , Yiannis Demiris

To recognize an object in an image, the user must apply a combination of operators, where each operator has a set of parameters. These parameters must be well adjusted in order to reach good results. Usually, this adjustment is made…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2012-11-30 Issam Qaffou , Mohamed Sadgal , Aziz Elfazziki

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Mateo Juliani , Mingxuan Li , Elias Bareinboim