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For continuing environments, reinforcement learning (RL) methods commonly maximize the discounted reward criterion with discount factor close to 1 in order to approximate the average reward (the gain). However, such a criterion only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Vektor Dewanto , Marcus Gallagher

Artificial intelligence progresses towards the "Era of Experience," where agents are expected to learn from continuous, grounded interaction. We argue that traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL), which typically represents value as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Xidong Feng , Bo Liu , Yan Song , Haotian Fu , Ziyu Wan , Girish A. Koushik , Zhiyuan Hu , Mengyue Yang , Ying Wen , Jun Wang

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically rely on the assumption that the environment dynamics and value function can be expressed in terms of a Markovian state representation. However, when state information is only partially observable,…

The recent advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has established their potential as autonomous interactive agents. However, they often struggle in strategic games of incomplete information, such as bilateral price negotiation. In this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Shuze Daniel Liu , Claire Chen , Jiabao Sean Xiao , Lei Lei , Yuheng Zhang , Yisong Yue , David Simchi-Levi

The analysis of Temporal Difference (TD) learning in the average-reward setting faces notable theoretical difficulties because the Bellman operator is not contractive with respect to any norm. This complicates standard analyses of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Haoxing Tian , Zaiwei Chen , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Alex Olshevsky

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of finding a reward function that generates a given optimal policy for a given Markov Decision Process. This paper looks at an algorithmic-independent geometric analysis of the IRL problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-19 Abi Komanduru , Jean Honorio

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach for solving various control, optimization, and sequential decision making tasks. However, designing reward functions for complex tasks (e.g., with multiple objectives and safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-23 Xuan Zhao , Marcos Campos

In reinforcement learning the Q-values summarize the expected future rewards that the agent will attain. However, they cannot capture the epistemic uncertainty about those rewards. In this work we derive a new Bellman operator with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-07 Brendan O'Donoghue

The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-25 Wuxia Chen , Taposh Banerjee , Jemin George , Carl Busart

In many finite horizon episodic reinforcement learning (RL) settings, it is desirable to optimize for the undiscounted return - in settings like Atari, for instance, the goal is to collect the most points while staying alive in the long…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Joshua Romoff , Peter Henderson , Ahmed Touati , Emma Brunskill , Joelle Pineau , Yann Ollivier

For AI systems to be useful to humans, they must understand and act in accordance with our values and preferences. Since specifying preferences is a hard task, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to develop methods that allow for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Karim Abdel Sadek , Mark Bedaywi , Rhys Gould , Stuart Russell

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a flexible and efficient method for programming micro-robots in complex environments. Here we investigate whether reinforcement learning can provide insights into biological systems when trained to perform…

Biological Physics · Physics 2024-04-03 Samuel Tovey , Christoph Lohrmann , Christian Holm

Reinforcement Learning views the maximization of rewards and avoidance of punishments as central to explaining goal-directed behavior. However, over a life, organisms will need to learn about many different aspects of the world's structure:…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Thomas J. Ringstrom

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Paul Rolland , Luca Viano , Norman Schuerhoff , Boris Nikolov , Volkan Cevher

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their selection of actions to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Temporal Difference (TD) Learning -- a model-free RL method -- is a leading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

A prominent theme in behavioural contract theory is the study of present-biased agents represented through quasi-hyperbolic discounting. In a model of competitive credit provision, we study an alternative to this framework in which the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-11 Siddharth Chatterjee , Daniel F. Garrett

Reward design is a key component of deep reinforcement learning, yet some tasks and designer's objectives may be unnatural to define as a scalar cost function. Among the various techniques, formal methods integrated with DRL have garnered…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Jiangwei Wang , Shuo Yang , Ziyan An , Songyang Han , Zhili Zhang , Rahul Mangharam , Meiyi Ma , Fei Miao

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

Existing agents for solving tasks such as ML engineering rely on prompting powerful language models. As a result, these agents do not improve with more experience. In this paper, we show that agents backed by weaker models that improve via…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Sherry Yang , Joy He-Yueya , Percy Liang

Reinforcement Learning has suffered from poor reward specification, and issues for reward hacking even in simple enough domains. Preference Based Reinforcement Learning attempts to solve the issue by utilizing binary feedbacks on queried…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-20 Mudit Verma , Subbarao Kambhampati