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We consider the multi-agent reinforcement learning setting with imperfect information in which each agent is trying to maximize its own utility. The reward function depends on the hidden state (or goal) of both agents, so the agents must…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-03-28 Roberta Raileanu , Emily Denton , Arthur Szlam , Rob Fergus

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Daniel Shin , Daniel S. Brown , Anca D. Dragan

Modeling the purposeful behavior of imperfect agents from a small number of observations is a challenging task. When restricted to the single-agent decision-theoretic setting, inverse optimal control techniques assume that observed behavior…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Kevin Waugh , Brian D. Ziebart , J. Andrew Bagnell

Many high-performance human activities are executed with little or no external feedback: think of a figure skater landing a triple jump, a pitcher throwing a curveball for a strike, or a barista pouring latte art. To study the process of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Antonio Terpin , Raffaello D'Andrea

In reinforcement learning, a decision needs to be made at some point as to whether it is worthwhile to carry on with the learning process or to terminate it. In many such situations, stochastic elements are often present which govern the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-13 Nikki Lijing Kuang , Clement H. C. Leung

Recent work has demonstrated that problems-- particularly imitation learning and structured prediction-- where a learner's predictions influence the input-distribution it is tested on can be naturally addressed by an interactive approach…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-06-24 Stephane Ross , J. Andrew Bagnell

Exploration algorithms for reinforcement learning typically replace or augment the reward function with an additional ``intrinsic'' reward that trains the agent to seek previously unseen states of the environment. Here, we consider an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Kevin McKee , Eric Alt , Andrew Grebenisan , Mick van Gelderen , Gary Miguel

Reinforcement learning algorithms are generally designed to maximize the expected return across a population. However, a policy that is optimal on average may be suboptimal for certain individuals, leading to potential safety concerns. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Jingyi Li , Peng Wu , Chengchun Shi

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central problem in artificial intelligence. This problem consists of defining artificial agents that can learn optimal behaviour by interacting with an environment -- where the optimal behaviour is defined…

Reinforcement learning provides a powerful and general framework for decision making and control, but its application in practice is often hindered by the need for extensive feature and reward engineering. Deep reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-15 Justin Fu , Katie Luo , Sergey Levine

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to discover better actions through exploration. However, typical exploration techniques aim to maximize rewards, often incurring high costs in both exploration and learning processes. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Akane Tsuboya , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi

Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Aviral Kumar , Xue Bin Peng , Sergey Levine

In the real world, RL agents should be rewarded for fulfilling human preferences. We show that RL agents implicitly learn the preferences of humans in their environment. Training a classifier to predict if a simulated human's preferences…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-02-17 Nevan Wichers

In practice, incentive providers (i.e., principals) often cannot observe the reward realizations of incentivized agents, which is in contrast to many principal-agent models that have been previously studied. This information asymmetry…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Ilgin Dogan , Zuo-Jun Max Shen , Anil Aswani

Reinforcement learning techniques achieved human-level performance in several tasks in the last decade. However, in recent years, the need for interpretability emerged: we want to be able to understand how a system works and the reasons…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-13 Leonardo Lucio Custode , Giovanni Iacca

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents typically optimize their policies by performing expensive backward passes to update their network parameters. However, some agents can solve new tasks without updating any parameters by simply conditioning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Amir Moeini , Jiuqi Wang , Jacob Beck , Ethan Blaser , Shimon Whiteson , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang

The tendency of repeating past choices more often than expected from the history of outcomes has been repeatedly empirically observed in reinforcement learning experiments. It can be explained by at least two computational processes:…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Isabelle Hoxha , Leo Sperber , Stefano Palminteri

Deep reinforcement learning agents have achieved state-of-the-art results by directly maximising cumulative reward. However, environments contain a much wider variety of possible training signals. In this paper, we introduce an agent that…

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

In this paper we propose a novel gradient algorithm to learn a policy from an expert's observed behavior assuming that the expert behaves optimally with respect to some unknown reward function of a Markovian Decision Problem. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-06-26 Gergely Neu , Csaba Szepesvari