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In this paper, we study an inverse reinforcement learning problem that involves learning the reward function of a learning agent using trajectory data collected while this agent is learning its optimal policy. To address this problem, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Kavinayan P. Sivakumar , Yi Shen , Zachary Bell , Scott Nivison , Boyuan Chen , Michael M. Zavlanos

Reinforcement learning agents learn from rewards, but humans can uniquely assign value to novel, abstract outcomes in a goal-dependent manner. However, this flexibility is cognitively costly, making learning less efficient. Here, we propose…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-09-11 Gaia Molinaro , Anne G. E. Collins

With reinforcement learning, an agent could learn complex behaviors from high-level abstractions of the task. However, exploration and reward shaping remained challenging for existing methods, especially in scenarios where the extrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Jie Chen , Wenjun Xu

A fundamental challenge in multiagent reinforcement learning is to learn beneficial behaviors in a shared environment with other simultaneously learning agents. In particular, each agent perceives the environment as effectively…

The main challenge of multiagent reinforcement learning is the difficulty of learning useful policies in the presence of other simultaneously learning agents whose changing behaviors jointly affect the environment's transition and reward…

In many real-world tasks, it is not possible to procedurally specify an RL agent's reward function. In such cases, a reward function must instead be learned from interacting with and observing humans. However, current techniques for reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Eric J. Michaud , Adam Gleave , Stuart Russell

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

One obstacle to applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems is the lack of suitable reward functions. Designing such reward functions is difficult in part because the user only has an implicit understanding of the task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Jan Leike , David Krueger , Tom Everitt , Miljan Martic , Vishal Maini , Shane Legg

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

Can artificial agents learn to assist others in achieving their goals without knowing what those goals are? Generic reinforcement learning agents could be trained to behave altruistically towards others by rewarding them for altruistic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Tim Franzmeyer , Mateusz Malinowski , João F. Henriques

Unlike reinforcement learning (RL) agents, humans remain capable multitaskers in changing environments. In spite of only experiencing the world through their own observations and interactions, people know how to balance focusing on tasks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Rishav Bhagat , Jonathan Balloch , Zhiyu Lin , Julia Kim , Mark Riedl

The pursuit of general intelligence has traditionally centered on external objectives: an agent's control over its environments or mastery of specific tasks. This external focus, however, can produce specialized agents that lack…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Hanqi Zhou , Fryderyk Mantiuk , David G. Nagy , Charley M. Wu

When deploying autonomous agents in the real world, we need effective ways of communicating objectives to them. Traditional skill learning has revolved around reinforcement and imitation learning, each with rigid constraints on the format…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Mark Woodward , Chelsea Finn , Karol Hausman

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

A long-standing challenge in Reinforcement Learning is enabling agents to learn a model of their environment which can be transferred to solve other problems in a world with the same underlying rules. One reason this is difficult is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-16 Kai Olav Ellefsen , Jim Torresen

Reinforcement learning has enabled agents to solve challenging tasks in unknown environments. However, manually crafting reward functions can be time consuming, expensive, and error prone to human error. Competing objectives have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-11 Brendon Matusch , Jimmy Ba , Danijar Hafner

We present a novel method for learning a set of disentangled reward functions that sum to the original environment reward and are constrained to be independently obtainable. We define independent obtainability in terms of value functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-06 Christopher Grimm , Satinder Singh

The broader application of reinforcement learning (RL) is limited by challenges including data efficiency, generalization capability, and ability to learn in sparse-reward environments. Meta-learning has emerged as a promising approach to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Octavio Pappalardo , Rodrigo Ramele , Juan Miguel Santos

The common purpose of applying reinforcement learning (RL) to asset management is the maximization of profit. The extrinsic reward function used to learn an optimal strategy typically does not take into account any other preferences or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Charl Maree , Christian W. Omlin

In computational reinforcement learning, a growing body of work seeks to construct an agent's perception of the world through predictions of future sensations; predictions about environment observations are used as additional input features…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-15 Alexandra Kearney , Anna Koop , Johannes Günther , Patrick M. Pilarski