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Large language models are typically aligned with human preferences by optimizing $\textit{reward models}$ (RMs) fitted to human feedback. However, human preferences are multi-faceted, and it is increasingly common to derive reward from a…

Robust reinforcement learning (RRL) aims at seeking a robust policy to optimize the worst case performance over an uncertainty set of Markov decision processes (MDPs). This set contains some perturbed MDPs from a nominal MDP (N-MDP) that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Ukjo Hwang , Songnam Hong

In traditional reinforcement learning (RL), the learner aims to solve a single objective optimization problem: find the policy that maximizes expected reward. However, in many real-world settings, it is important to optimize over multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Eric Eaton , Marcel Hussing , Michael Kearns , Aaron Roth , Sikata Bela Sengupta , Jessica Sorrell

Adaptive robust optimization (ARO) extends static robust optimization by allowing decisions to depend on the realized uncertainty - weakly dominating static solutions within the modeled uncertainty set. However, ARO makes previous…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-20 Karl Zhu , Dimitris Bertsimas

Sequential decision making, commonly formalized as optimization of a Markov Decision Process, is a key challenge in artificial intelligence. Two successful approaches to MDP optimization are reinforcement learning and planning, which both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-01 Thomas M. Moerland , Joost Broekens , Aske Plaat , Catholijn M. Jonker

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) has been shown to be a powerful framework for data-efficiently learning control of continuous tasks. Recent work in MBRL has mostly focused on using more advanced function approximators and planning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Nathan Lambert , Brandon Amos , Omry Yadan , Roberto Calandra

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) assumes that an agent can observe a reward for each state-action pair. However, in practical applications, it is often difficult and costly to collect a reward for each state-action pair. While there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Yihan Du , Anna Winnicki , Gal Dalal , Shie Mannor , R. Srikant

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) is inherently a reactive method, operating under the assumption that it starts with no prior knowledge of the system and entirely depends on trial-and-error for learning. This approach faces several…

We propose and study a general framework for regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected discounted total reward plus a policy regularization term. The extant…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-22 Xiang Li , Wenhao Yang , Zhihua Zhang

We consider a setting for Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) where the learner is extended with the ability to actively select multiple environments, observing an agent's behavior on each environment. We first demonstrate that if the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-01-26 Kareem Amin , Satinder Singh

The framework of mixed observable Markov decision processes (MOMDP) models many robotic domains in which some state variables are fully observable while others are not. In this work, we identify a significant subclass of MOMDPs defined by…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Hai Nguyen , Zhihan Yang , Andrea Baisero , Xiao Ma , Robert Platt , Christopher Amato

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework which is suitable for both the batch RL setting and the setting where there are many reward functions of interest. During the exploration phase, an agent collects samples without using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ruosong Wang , Simon S. Du , Lin F. Yang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Motivated by the novel paradigm developed by Van Roy and coauthors for reinforcement learning in arbitrary non-Markovian environments, we propose a related formulation and explicitly pin down the error caused by non-Markovianity of…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Siddharth Chandak , Pratik Shah , Vivek S Borkar , Parth Dodhia

Past analyses of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) assume that the human evaluators fully observe the environment. What happens when human feedback is based only on partial observations? We formally define two failure cases:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Leon Lang , Davis Foote , Stuart Russell , Anca Dragan , Erik Jenner , Scott Emmons

This work studies the problem of batch off-policy evaluation for Reinforcement Learning in partially observable environments. Off-policy evaluation under partial observability is inherently prone to bias, with risk of arbitrarily large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor , Uri Shalit

This work pioneers regret analysis of risk-sensitive reinforcement learning in partially observable environments with hindsight observation, addressing a gap in theoretical exploration. We introduce a novel formulation that integrates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-29 Tonghe Zhang , Yu Chen , Longbo Huang

In real-world reinforcement learning (RL) systems, various forms of {\it impaired observability} can complicate matters. These situations arise when an agent is unable to observe the most recent state of the system due to latency or lossy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Minshuo Chen , Jie Meng , Yu Bai , Yinyu Ye , H. Vincent Poor , Mengdi Wang

In typical reinforcement learning (RL), the environment is assumed given and the goal of the learning is to identify an optimal policy for the agent taking actions through its interactions with the environment. In this paper, we extend this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-10-25 Haifeng Zhang , Jun Wang , Zhiming Zhou , Weinan Zhang , Ying Wen , Yong Yu , Wenxin Li

To overcome the curses of dimensionality and modeling of Dynamic Programming (DP) methods to solve Markov Decision Process (MDP) problems, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are adopted in practice. Contrary to traditional RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Arghyadip Roy , Vivek Borkar , Abhay Karandikar , Prasanna Chaporkar

When Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents are deployed in practice, they might impact their environment and change its dynamics. We propose a new framework to model this phenomenon, where the current environment depends on the deployed policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Ben Rank , Stelios Triantafyllou , Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic