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Reward learning enables the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to tasks where reward is defined by human judgment, building a model of reward by asking humans questions. Most work on reward learning has used simulated environments,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Daniel M. Ziegler , Nisan Stiennon , Jeffrey Wu , Tom B. Brown , Alec Radford , Dario Amodei , Paul Christiano , Geoffrey Irving

Learning reward functions remains the bottleneck to equip a robot with a broad repertoire of skills. Large Language Models (LLM) contain valuable task-related knowledge that can potentially aid in the learning of reward functions. However,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Yuwei Zeng , Yao Mu , Lin Shao

Recent years have seen a boom in interest in machine learning systems that can provide a human-understandable rationale for their predictions or decisions. However, exactly what kinds of explanation are truly human-interpretable remains…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-05 Menaka Narayanan , Emily Chen , Jeffrey He , Been Kim , Sam Gershman , Finale Doshi-Velez

Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task. This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Dhawal Gupta , Yash Chandak , Scott M. Jordan , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

Reward functions are central in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding agents towards optimal decision-making. The complexity of RL tasks requires meticulously designed reward functions that effectively drive learning while avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Rati Devidze

Reinforcement-learning agents seek to maximize a reward signal through environmental interactions. As humans, our job in the learning process is to design reward functions to express desired behavior and enable the agent to learn such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Zhiyuan Zhou , Shreyas Sundara Raman , Henry Sowerby , Michael L. Littman

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

Large language models often respond to ambiguous requests by implicitly committing to one interpretation, frustrating users and creating safety risks when that interpretation is wrong. We propose generating a single structured response that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Irina Saparina , Mirella Lapata

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

This paper explores an intrinsic motivation for mutual awareness, hypothesizing that humans possess a fundamental drive to understand and to be understood even in the absence of extrinsic rewards. Through simulations of the perceptual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-11 Chrisantha Fernando , Dylan Banarse , Simon Osindero

Large language models (LLMs) trained with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their underlying reward functions and decision-making processes remain opaque. This paper introduces…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jared Joselowitz , Ritam Majumdar , Arjun Jagota , Matthieu Bou , Nyal Patel , Satyapriya Krishna , Sonali Parbhoo

We introduce Concept Bottleneck Reward Models (CB-RM), a reward modeling framework that enables interpretable preference learning through selective concept annotation. Unlike standard RLHF methods that rely on opaque reward functions, CB-RM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Sonia Laguna , Katarzyna Kobalczyk , Julia E. Vogt , Mihaela Van der Schaar

We present a framework for learning human user models from joint-action demonstrations that enables the robot to compute a robust policy for a collaborative task with a human. The learning takes place completely automatically, without any…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-06-15 Stefanos Nikolaidis , Keren Gu , Ramya Ramakrishnan , Julie Shah

The sequential nature of decision-making in financial asset trading aligns naturally with the reinforcement learning (RL) framework, making RL a common approach in this domain. However, the low signal-to-noise ratio in financial markets…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Sven Goluža , Tomislav Kovačević , Stjepan Begušić , Zvonko Kostanjčar

This paper investigates the problem of interactively learning behaviors communicated by a human teacher using positive and negative feedback. Much previous work on this problem has made the assumption that people provide feedback for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-31 James MacGlashan , Mark K Ho , Robert Loftin , Bei Peng , Guan Wang , David Roberts , Matthew E. Taylor , Michael L. Littman

An ambitious goal for machine learning is to create agents that behave ethically: The capacity to abide by human moral norms would greatly expand the context in which autonomous agents could be practically and safely deployed, e.g. fully…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-21 Adrien Ecoffet , Joel Lehman

We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Nadav Merlis

Humans are spectacular reinforcement learners, constantly learning from and adjusting to experience and feedback. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily mean humans are fast learners. When tasks are challenging, learning can become…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Mark A. Rucker , Layne T. Watson , Matthew S. Gerber , Laura E. Barnes

Reinforcement learning is a general method for learning in sequential settings, but it can often be difficult to specify a good reward function when the task is complex. In these cases, preference feedback or expert demonstrations can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Jason R Brown , Carl Henrik Ek , Robert D Mullins

Reinforcement learning from human feedback usually models preferences using a reward function that does not distinguish between people. We argue that this is unlikely to be a good design choice in contexts with high potential for…