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When robots enter everyday human environments, they need to understand their tasks and how they should perform those tasks. To encode these, reward functions, which specify the objective of a robot, are employed. However, designing reward…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Erdem Bıyık

Rewards and punishments in different forms are pervasive and present in a wide variety of decision-making scenarios. By observing the outcome of a sufficient number of repeated trials, one would gradually learn the value and usefulness of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Nikki Lijing Kuang , Clement H. C. Leung

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

It is often very challenging to manually design reward functions for complex, real-world tasks. To solve this, one can instead use reward learning to infer a reward function from data. However, there are often multiple reward functions that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-08 Joar Skalse , Matthew Farrugia-Roberts , Stuart Russell , Alessandro Abate , Adam Gleave

There has been significant progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) in recent years. Nevertheless, finding suitable hyperparameter configurations and reward functions remains challenging even for experts, and performance heavily relies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Julian Dierkes , Emma Cramer , Holger H. Hoos , Sebastian Trimpe

There is a surge of interest in using formal languages such as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) to precisely and succinctly specify complex tasks and derive reward functions for Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, existing methods often assign…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Minjae Kwon , Ingy ElSayed-Aly , Lu Feng

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective approach to motion planning in autonomous driving, where an optimal driving policy can be automatically learned using the interaction data with the environment. Nevertheless, the reward function…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Lin-Chi Wu , Zengjie Zhang , Sofie Haesaert , Zhiqiang Ma , Zhiyong Sun

We study reward design strategies for incentivizing a reinforcement learning agent to adopt a policy from a set of admissible policies. The goal of the reward designer is to modify the underlying reward function cost-efficiently while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-07 Kiarash Banihashem , Adish Singla , Jiarui Gan , Goran Radanovic

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be effective in many scenarios. However, it typically requires the exploration of a sufficiently large number of state-action pairs, some of which may be unsafe. Consequently, its application to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-24 Yousef Emam , Gennaro Notomista , Paul Glotfelter , Zsolt Kira , Magnus Egerstedt

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become a key factor in aligning model behavior with users' goals. However, while humans integrate multiple strategies when making decisions, current RLHF approaches often simplify this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Evelyn Rose , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents continually interact with the environment and use the feedback to refine their behavior. To guide policy optimization, reward models are introduced as proxies of the desired objectives, such that when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Rui Yu , Shenghua Wan , Yucen Wang , Chen-Xiao Gao , Le Gan , Zongzhang Zhang , De-Chuan Zhan

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

Building interpretable parameterizations of real-world decision-making on the basis of demonstrated behavior -- i.e. trajectories of observations and actions made by an expert maximizing some unknown reward function -- is essential for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-31 Ioana Bica , Daniel Jarrett , Alihan Hüyük , Mihaela van der Schaar

Video generation models produce visually coherent content but struggle with tasks requiring spatial reasoning and multi-step planning. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a path to improve generalization, but its effectiveness in video…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Ming Liu , Yunbei Zhang , Shilong Liu , Liwen Wang , Wensheng Zhang

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Vitchyr H. Pong , Rowan McAllister , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard paradigm for refining large language models (LLMs) beyond pre-training and instruction tuning. A prominent line of work is RL with verifiable rewards (RLVR), which leverages automatically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Bonan Zhang , Zhongqi Chen , Bowen Song , Qinya Li , Fan Wu , Guihai Chen

Reward design remains a significant bottleneck in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. A popular alternative is reward learning, where reward functions are inferred from human feedback rather than manually specified.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Chaitanya Kharyal , Calarina Muslimani , Matthew E. Taylor

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Kianté Brantley , Hal Daumé , Miroslav Dudik , Robert Schapire

Safety in reinforcement learning (RL) is a key property in both training and execution in many domains such as autonomous driving or finance. In this paper, we formalize it with a constrained RL formulation in the distributional RL setting.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Jianyi Zhang , Paul Weng

Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a powerful framework for optimizing dynamic treatment regimes (DTRs). However, clinical RL is fundamentally bottlenecked by reward engineering: the challenge of defining signals that safely and effectively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Qianyi Xu , Gousia Habib , Feng Wu , Yanrui Du , Zhihui Chen , Swapnil Mishra , Dilruk Perera , Mengling Feng