English
Related papers

Related papers: Performance Dynamics and Termination Errors in Rei…

200 papers

Reinforcement learning algorithms are generally designed to maximize the expected return across a population. However, a policy that is optimal on average may be suboptimal for certain individuals, leading to potential safety concerns. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Jingyi Li , Peng Wu , Chengchun Shi

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

The ability of reinforcement learning algorithms to learn effective policies is determined by the rewards available during training. However, for practical problems, obtaining large quantities of reward labels is often infeasible due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Shreyas Chaudhari , Renhao Zhang , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

In reinforcement learning, the goal is to seek rewards and avoid punishments. A simple scalar captures the value of a state or of taking an action, where expected future rewards increase and punishments decrease this quantity. Naturally an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-02-19 Patrick C. Connor , Thomas P. Trappenberg

Safety constraints and optimality are important, but sometimes conflicting criteria for controllers. Although these criteria are often solved separately with different tools to maintain formal guarantees, it is also common practice in…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-10 Pierre-François Massiani , Steve Heim , Friedrich Solowjow , Sebastian Trimpe

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for decision processes with non-Markovian reward, in which high-level knowledge of the task in the form of reward machines is available to the learner. We consider probabilistic reward machines with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Hippolyte Bourel , Anders Jonsson , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Chenxiao Ma , Mohammad Sadegh Talebi

Reinforcement learning has emerged as an important approach for autonomous driving. A reward function is used in reinforcement learning to establish the learned skill objectives and guide the agent toward the optimal policy. Since…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Ahmed Abouelazm , Jonas Michel , J. Marius Zoellner

This paper surveys the field of reinforcement learning from a computer-science perspective. It is written to be accessible to researchers familiar with machine learning. Both the historical basis of the field and a broad selection of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-11-17 L. P. Kaelbling , M. L. Littman , A. W. Moore

In the era of deep reinforcement learning, making progress is more complex, as the collected experience must be compressed into a deep model for future exploitation and sampling. Many papers have shown that training a deep learning policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Glen Berseth

Decision-focused learning integrates predictive modeling and combinatorial optimization by training models to directly improve decision quality rather than prediction accuracy alone. Differentiating through combinatorial optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Victor Spitzer , Francois Sanson

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

Recent developments in sequential experimental design look to construct a policy that can efficiently navigate the design space, in a way that maximises the expected information gain. Whilst there is work on achieving tractable policies for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Yasir Zubayr Barlas , Kizito Salako

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

We present the problem of reinforcement learning with exogenous termination. We define the Termination Markov Decision Process (TerMDP), an extension of the MDP framework, in which episodes may be interrupted by an external non-Markovian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-09 Guy Tennenholtz , Nadav Merlis , Lior Shani , Shie Mannor , Uri Shalit , Gal Chechik , Assaf Hallak , Gal Dalal

Designing an effective reward function has long been a challenge in reinforcement learning, particularly for complex tasks in unstructured environments. To address this, various learning paradigms have emerged that leverage different forms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Muhammad Qasim Elahi , Somtochukwu Oguchienti , Maheed H. Ahmed , Mahsa Ghasemi

The framework of reinforcement learning or optimal control provides a mathematical formalization of intelligent decision making that is powerful and broadly applicable. While the general form of the reinforcement learning problem enables…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-22 Sergey Levine

Optimization models used to make discrete decisions often contain uncertain parameters that are context-dependent and estimated through prediction. To account for the quality of the decision made based on the prediction, decision-focused…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Noah Schutte , Krzysztof Postek , Neil Yorke-Smith

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

No real-world reward function is perfect. Sensory errors and software bugs may result in RL agents observing higher (or lower) rewards than they should. For example, a reinforcement learning agent may prefer states where a sensory error…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-08-22 Tom Everitt , Victoria Krakovna , Laurent Orseau , Marcus Hutter , Shane Legg

A reinforcement learning agent tries to maximize its cumulative payoff by interacting in an unknown environment. It is important for the agent to explore suboptimal actions as well as to pick actions with highest known rewards. Yet, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-23 Reazul Hasan Russel