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In environments with sparse rewards, finding a good inductive bias for exploration is crucial to the agent's success. However, there are two competing goals: novelty search and systematic exploration. While existing approaches such as…
Aggressive incentive schemes that allow individuals to impose economic punishment on themselves if they fail to meet health goals present a promising approach for encouraging healthier behavior. However, the element of choice inherent in…
We consider the problem of reinforcement learning using function approximation, where the approximating basis can change dynamically while interacting with the environment. A motivation for such an approach is maximizing the value function…
When learning to behave in a stochastic environment where safety is critical, such as driving a vehicle in traffic, it is natural for human drivers to plan fallback strategies as a backup to use if ever there is an unexpected change in the…
We seek to align agent behavior with a user's objectives in a reinforcement learning setting with unknown dynamics, an unknown reward function, and unknown unsafe states. The user knows the rewards and unsafe states, but querying the user…
We study tabular reinforcement learning problems with multiple steps of lookahead information. Before acting, the learner observes $\ell$ steps of future transition and reward realizations: the exact state the agent would reach and the…
Learning auxiliary tasks, such as multiple predictions about the world, can provide many benefits to reinforcement learning systems. A variety of off-policy learning algorithms have been developed to learn such predictions, but as yet there…
When independently trained or designed robots are deployed in a shared environment, their combined actions can lead to unintended negative side effects (NSEs). To ensure safe and efficient operation, robots must optimize task performance…
Rewards serve as a measure of user satisfaction and act as a limiting factor in interactive recommender systems. In this research, we focus on the problem of learning to reward (LTR), which is fundamental to reinforcement learning. Previous…
Reinforcement learning algorithms have had tremendous successes in online learning settings. However, these successes have relied on low-stakes interactions between the algorithmic agent and its environment. In many settings where RL could…
Reinforcement learning (RL) systems can be complex and non-interpretable, making it challenging for non-AI experts to understand or intervene in their decisions. This is due in part to the sequential nature of RL in which actions are chosen…
This paper introduces a new method for inverse reinforcement learning in large-scale and high-dimensional state spaces. To avoid solving the computationally expensive reinforcement learning problems in reward learning, we propose a function…
As the data-driven decision process becomes dominating for industrial applications, fairness-aware machine learning arouses great attention in various areas. This work proposes fairness penalties learned by neural networks with a simple…
The famous Policy Iteration algorithm alternates between policy improvement and policy evaluation. Implementations of this algorithm with several variants of the latter evaluation stage, e.g, $n$-step and trace-based returns, have been…
Reinforcement learners can attain high reward through novel unintended strategies. We study a Bayesian mitigation for general environments: we expand the agent's subjective reward range to include a large negative value $-L$, while the true…
Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents can often be difficult, involving meticulous design of reward functions that are sufficiently informative yet easy enough to provide. Human-in-the-loop RL methods allow…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in fields like robotics and autonomous driving, but adversarial attacks designed to mislead RL systems remain challenging. Existing approaches often rely on modifying the…
Despite recent advances in robust locomotion, bipedal robots operating in the real world remain at risk of falling. While most research focuses on preventing such events, we instead concentrate on the phenomenon of falling itself.…
We consider a longitudinal data structure consisting of baseline covariates, time-varying treatment variables, intermediate time-dependent covariates, and a possibly time dependent outcome. Previous studies have shown that estimating the…
Designing effective reward functions is critical for reinforcement learning-based biomechanical simulations, yet HCI researchers and practitioners often waste (computation) time with unintuitive trial-and-error tuning. This paper…