Related papers: Sequence Modeling of Temporal Credit Assignment fo…
Real-world robotic tasks require complex reward functions. When we define the problem the robot needs to solve, we pretend that a designer specifies this complex reward exactly, and it is set in stone from then on. In practice, however,…
The aim of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world applications is to create systems capable of making autonomous decisions by learning from their environment through trial and error. This paper emphasizes the importance of reward…
The remarkable success of reinforcement learning (RL) heavily relies on observing the reward of every visited state-action pair. In many real world applications, however, an agent can observe only a score that represents the quality of the…
When a person is not satisfied with how a robot performs a task, they can intervene to correct it. Reward learning methods enable the robot to adapt its reward function online based on such human input, but they rely on handcrafted…
Goals for reinforcement learning problems are typically defined through hand-specified rewards. To design such problems, developers of learning algorithms must inherently be aware of what the task goals are, yet we often require agents to…
The recency heuristic in reinforcement learning is the assumption that stimuli that occurred closer in time to an acquired reward should be more heavily reinforced. The recency heuristic is one of the key assumptions made by TD($\lambda$),…
One of the fundamental challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) is the one of data efficiency: modern algorithms require a very large number of training samples, especially compared to humans, for solving environments with high-dimensional…
Deep reinforcement learning has enabled robots to learn motor skills from environmental interactions with minimal to no prior knowledge. However, existing reinforcement learning algorithms assume an episodic setting, in which the agent…
Many continuous control tasks have easily formulated objectives, yet using them directly as a reward in reinforcement learning (RL) leads to suboptimal policies. Therefore, many classical control tasks guide RL training using complex…
Many reinforcement learning (RL) tasks have specific properties that can be leveraged to modify existing RL algorithms to adapt to those tasks and further improve performance, and a general class of such properties is the multiple reward…
Credit assignmen, disentangling each agent's contribution to a shared reward, is a critical challenge in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). To be effective, credit assignment methods must preserve the environment's…
A computational problem in biological reward-based learning is how credit assignment is performed in the nucleus accumbens (NAc). Much research suggests that NAc dopamine encodes temporal-difference (TD) errors for learning value…
We present an efficient algorithm for model-free episodic reinforcement learning on large (potentially continuous) state-action spaces. Our algorithm is based on a novel $Q$-learning policy with adaptive data-driven discretization. The…
Traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms assume the distribution of the data to be uniform or mostly uniform. However, this is not the case with most real-world applications like autonomous driving or in nature where animals roam.…
Reward learning enables robots to learn adaptable behaviors from human input. Traditional methods model the reward as a linear function of hand-crafted features, but that requires specifying all the relevant features a priori, which is…
We design a new provably efficient algorithm for episodic reinforcement learning with generalized linear function approximation. We analyze the algorithm under a new expressivity assumption that we call "optimistic closure," which is…
In the last decade, Deep Reinforcement Learning has evolved into a powerful tool for complex sequential decision-making problems. It combines deep learning's proficiency in processing rich input signals with reinforcement learning's…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for tackling control problems, but its practical application is often hindered by the complexity arising from intricate reward functions with multiple terms. The reward hypothesis…
Reinforcement learning for multi-step reasoning with large language models (LLMs) typically relies on sparse terminal rewards, which creates a poorly conditioned credit-assignment problem: the final feedback is propagated uniformly across…
The temporal lag between actions and their long-term consequences makes credit assignment a challenge when learning goal-directed behaviors from data. Generative world models capture the distribution of future states an agent may visit,…