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Reward functions are notoriously difficult to specify, especially for tasks with complex goals. Reward learning approaches attempt to infer reward functions from human feedback and preferences. Prior works on reward learning have mainly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-11 Lev McKinney , Yawen Duan , David Krueger , Adam Gleave

Inverse Reinforcement Learning addresses the problem of inferring an expert's reward function from demonstrations. However, in many applications, we not only have access to the expert's near-optimal behavior, but we also observe part of her…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Giorgia Ramponi , Gianluca Drappo , Marcello Restelli

The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-25 Wuxia Chen , Taposh Banerjee , Jemin George , Carl Busart

It is often difficult to hand-specify what the correct reward function is for a task, so researchers have instead aimed to learn reward functions from human behavior or feedback. The types of behavior interpreted as evidence of the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-14 Hong Jun Jeon , Smitha Milli , Anca D. Dragan

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

A characteristic of reinforcement learning is the ability to develop unforeseen strategies when solving problems. While such strategies sometimes yield superior performance, they may also result in undesired or even dangerous behavior. In…

In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Grigorii Veviurko , Wendelin Böhmer , Mathijs de Weerdt

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

We present a method for learning intrinsic reward functions to drive the learning of an agent during periods of practice in which extrinsic task rewards are not available. During practice, the environment may differ from the one available…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-12-17 Janarthanan Rajendran , Richard Lewis , Vivek Veeriah , Honglak Lee , Satinder Singh

Inverse reinforcement learning attempts to reconstruct the reward function in a Markov decision problem, using observations of agent actions. As already observed in Russell [1998] the problem is ill-posed, and the reward function is not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-09 Haoyang Cao , Samuel N. Cohen , Lukasz Szpruch

Reward function, as an incentive representation that recognizes humans' agency and rationalizes humans' actions, is particularly appealing for modeling human behavior in human-robot interaction. Inverse Reinforcement Learning is an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Ran Tian , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Liting Sun

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to train an agent from a reward function in a given environment, Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) seeks to recover the reward function from observing an expert's behavior. It is well known that, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Paul Rolland , Luca Viano , Norman Schuerhoff , Boris Nikolov , Volkan Cevher

Reward functions are central in specifying the task we want a reinforcement learning agent to perform. Given a task and desired optimal behavior, we study the problem of designing informative reward functions so that the designed rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Rati Devidze , Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Adish Singla

This work considers a repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal can only interact with her environment through the agent. The principal and the agent have misaligned objectives and the choice of action is only left to the…

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning under safety requirements, in which an agent is trained to complete a given task, typically formalized as the maximization of a reward signal over time, while concurrently avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Tu-Hoa Pham , Giovanni De Magistris , Don Joven Agravante , Subhajit Chaudhury , Asim Munawar , Ryuki Tachibana

Imitation learning is an effective alternative approach to learn a policy when the reward function is sparse. In this paper, we consider a challenging setting where an agent and an expert use different actions from each other. We assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Konrad Zolna , Negar Rostamzadeh , Yoshua Bengio , Sungjin Ahn , Pedro O. Pinheiro

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) enables an agent to learn complex behavior by observing demonstrations from a (near-)optimal policy. The typical assumption is that the learner's goal is to match the teacher's demonstrated behavior. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Sebastian Tschiatschek , Ahana Ghosh , Luis Haug , Rati Devidze , Adish Singla

We study online learning for optimal allocation when the resource to be allocated is time. %Examples of possible applications include job scheduling for a computing server, a driver filling a day with rides, a landlord renting an estate,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-05 Etienne Boursier , Tristan Garrec , Vianney Perchet , Marco Scarsini

In preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), a reward function is learned from a type of human feedback called preference. To expedite preference collection, recent works have leveraged \emph{offline preferences}, which are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Guoxi Zhang , Han Bao , Hisashi Kashima