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The goal of the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem is to recover the reward functions from expert demonstrations. However, the IRL problem like any ill-posed inverse problem suffers the congenital defect that the policy may be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-26 Ce Ju

Modern Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms require estimates of the maximal Q-value, which are difficult to compute in continuous domains with an infinite number of possible actions. In this work, we introduce a new update rule for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Divyansh Garg , Joey Hejna , Matthieu Geist , Stefano Ermon

Equivariant neural networks have shown great success in reinforcement learning, improving sample efficiency and generalization when there is symmetry in the task. However, in many problems, only approximate symmetry is present, which makes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Jung Yeon Park , Sujay Bhatt , Sihan Zeng , Lawson L. S. Wong , Alec Koppel , Sumitra Ganesh , Robin Walters

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework to optimize a control policy using rewards that are revealed by the system as a response to a control action. In its standard form, RL involves a single agent that uses its policy to accomplish a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-11-24 Juan Cervino , Juan Andres Bazerque , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a popular paradigm for aligning models with human intent. Typically RLHF algorithms operate in two phases: first, use human preferences to learn a reward function and second,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Joey Hejna , Rafael Rafailov , Harshit Sikchi , Chelsea Finn , Scott Niekum , W. Bradley Knox , Dorsa Sadigh

This paper presents a general framework for exploiting the representational capacity of neural networks to approximate complex, nonlinear reward functions in the context of solving the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem. We show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-14 Markus Wulfmeier , Peter Ondruska , Ingmar Posner

Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has been widely adapted due to its sample efficiency. However, existing worst-case regret analysis typically requires optimistic planning, which is not realistic in general. In contrast, motivated…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-10 Lingxiao Wang , Ping Li

How well do reward functions learned with inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) generalize? We illustrate that state-of-the-art IRL algorithms, which maximize a maximum-entropy objective, learn rewards that overfit to the demonstrations.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-29 Andrew Szot , Amy Zhang , Dhruv Batra , Zsolt Kira , Franziska Meier

Reinforcement learning (RL) studies how an agent comes to achieve reward in an environment through interactions over time. Recent advances in machine RL have surpassed human expertise at the world's oldest board games and many classic video…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-28 Pedro A. Tsividis , Joao Loula , Jake Burga , Nathan Foss , Andres Campero , Thomas Pouncy , Samuel J. Gershman , Joshua B. Tenenbaum

While reinforcement learning (RL) has become a more popular approach for robotics, designing sufficiently informative reward functions for complex tasks has proven to be extremely difficult due their inability to capture human intent and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-12-08 Joey Hejna , Dorsa Sadigh

Reward models have been increasingly critical for improving the reasoning capability of LLMs. Existing research has shown that a well-trained reward model can substantially improve model performances at inference time via search. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Jiaxuan Gao , Shusheng Xu , Wenjie Ye , Weilin Liu , Chuyi He , Wei Fu , Zhiyu Mei , Guangju Wang , Yi Wu

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) studies how to leverage environment statistics to learn useful behaviors without the cost of reward engineering. However, a central challenge in unsupervised RL is to extract behaviors that…

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

Reinforcement learning has become the standard for improving reasoning in large language models, yet evidence increasingly suggests that RL does not teach new strategies; it redistributes probability mass over solutions the base model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Ömer Faruk Akgül , Rajgopal Kannan , Willie Neiswanger , Viktor Prasanna

We study the challenging exploration incentive problem in both bandit and reinforcement learning, where the rewards are scale-free and potentially unbounded, driven by real-world scenarios and differing from existing work. Past works in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Mengfan Xu , Diego Klabjan

The aim of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is to infer a reward function $R$ from a policy $\pi$. To do this, we need a model of how $\pi$ relates to $R$. In the current literature, the most common models are optimality, Boltzmann…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-27 Joar Skalse , Alessandro Abate

To ensure the usefulness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real systems, it is crucial to ensure they are robust to noise and adversarial attacks. In adversarial RL, an external attacker has the power to manipulate the victim agent's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Jeremy McMahan , Young Wu , Xiaojin Zhu , Qiaomin Xie

Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a single policy that effectively solves multiple tasks at the same time. This paper presents a constrained formulation for multi-task RL where the goal is to maximize the average…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-07 Sihan Zeng , Thinh T. Doan , Justin Romberg

In reinforcement learning, specifying reward functions that capture the intended task can be very challenging. Reward learning aims to address this issue by learning the reward function. However, a learned reward model may have a low error…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Lukas Fluri , Leon Lang , Alessandro Abate , Patrick Forré , David Krueger , Joar Skalse

In reinforcement learning (RL), the ability to utilize prior knowledge from previously solved tasks can allow agents to quickly solve new problems. In some cases, these new problems may be approximately solved by composing the solutions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-02 Jacob Adamczyk , Argenis Arriojas , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni