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Reinforcement learning (RL) is used in many domains, including autonomous driving, robotics, stock trading, and video games. Unfortunately, the black box nature of RL agents, combined with legal and ethical considerations, makes it…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Aditi Mishra , Utkarsh Soni , Jinbin Huang , Chris Bryan

This article is a gentle discussion about the field of reinforcement learning in practice, about opportunities and challenges, touching a broad range of topics, with perspectives and without technical details. The article is based on both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Yuxi Li

Reinforcement Learning (RL) in games has gained significant momentum in recent years, enabling the creation of different agent behaviors that can transform a player's gaming experience. However, deploying RL agents in production…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-01 António Afonso , Iolanda Leite , Alessandro Sestini , Florian Fuchs , Konrad Tollmar , Linus Gisslén

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents with pre-specified reward functions cannot provide guaranteed safety across variety of circumstances that an uncertain system might encounter. To guarantee performance while assuring satisfaction of safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Aquib Mustafa , Majid Mazouchi , Subramanya Nageshrao , Hamidreza Modares

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-14 Glen Berseth , Florian Golemo , Christopher Pal

Reinforcement learning~(RL) is a versatile framework for learning to solve complex real-world tasks. However, influences on the learning performance of RL algorithms are often poorly understood in practice. We discuss different analysis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Jan Schneider , Pierre Schumacher , Daniel Häufle , Bernhard Schölkopf , Dieter Büchler

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in LLM reasoning, but whether it can also improve direct recall of parametric knowledge remains an open question. We study this question in a controlled zero-shot, one-hop,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Wanli Yang , Hongyu Zang , Junwei Zhang , Wenjie Shi , Du Su , Jingang Wang , Xueqi Cheng , Fei Sun

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular machine learning paradigm where intelligent agents interact with the environment to fulfill a long-term goal. Driven by the resurgence of deep learning, Deep RL (DRL) has witnessed great success over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Yunpeng Qing , Shunyu Liu , Jie Song , Yang Zhou , Kaixuan Chen , Huiqiong Wang , Mingli Song

The reward signal plays a central role in defining the desired behaviors of agents in reinforcement learning (RL). Rewards collected from realistic environments could be perturbed, corrupted, or noisy due to an adversary, sensor error, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Xi Chen , Zhihui Zhu , Andrew Perrault

The black-box nature of deep reinforcement learning (RL) hinders them from real-world applications. Therefore, interpreting and explaining RL agents have been active research topics in recent years. Existing methods for post-hoc…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Qisen Yang , Huanqian Wang , Mukun Tong , Wenjie Shi , Gao Huang , Shiji Song

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a general framework for adaptive control, which has proven to be efficient in many domains, e.g., board games, video games or autonomous vehicles. In such problems, an agent faces a sequential decision-making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Olivier Buffet , Olivier Pietquin , Paul Weng

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training LLM-based agents, yet remains limited by low sample efficiency, stemming not only from sparse outcome feedback but also from the agent's inability to leverage prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Dilxat Muhtar , Jiashun Liu , Wei Gao , Weixun Wang , Shaopan Xiong , Ju Huang , Siran Yang , Wenbo Su , Jiamang Wang , Ling Pan , Bo Zheng

While reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been successfully applied to numerous tasks, their reliance on neural networks makes their behavior difficult to understand and trust. Counterfactual explanations are human-friendly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Jasmina Gajcin , Ivana Dusparic

One of the most prominent methods for explaining the behavior of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents is the generation of saliency maps that show how much each pixel attributed to the agents' decision. However, there is no work that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Tobias Huber , Benedikt Limmer , Elisabeth André

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Evan Zheran Liu , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Tianlin Shi , Percy Liang

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims at learning an optimal control from a fixed dataset, without interactions with the system. An agent in this setting should avoid selecting actions whose consequences cannot be predicted from the…

Explanation is a key component for the adoption of reinforcement learning (RL) in many real-world decision-making problems. In the literature, the explanation is often provided by saliency attribution to the features of the RL agent's…

We study the problem of training a principal in a multi-agent general-sum game using reinforcement learning (RL). Learning a robust principal policy requires anticipating the worst possible strategic responses of other agents, which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-21 Eric Zhao , Alexander R. Trott , Caiming Xiong , Stephan Zheng

This paper focuses on reinforcement learning (RL) with limited prior knowledge. In the domain of swarm robotics for instance, the expert can hardly design a reward function or demonstrate the target behavior, forbidding the use of both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-08-07 Riad Akrour , Marc Schoenauer , Michèle Sebag

Safety is critical to broadening the application of reinforcement learning (RL). Often, we train RL agents in a controlled environment, such as a laboratory, before deploying them in the real world. However, the real-world target task might…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-22 Qisong Yang , Thiago D. Simão , Nils Jansen , Simon H. Tindemans , Matthijs T. J. Spaan