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To learn directed behaviors in complex environments, intelligent agents need to optimize objective functions. Various objectives are known for designing artificial agents, including task rewards and intrinsic motivation. However, it is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Danijar Hafner , Pedro A. Ortega , Jimmy Ba , Thomas Parr , Karl Friston , Nicolas Heess

The central tenet of reinforcement learning (RL) is that agents seek to maximize the sum of cumulative rewards. In contrast, active inference, an emerging framework within cognitive and computational neuroscience, proposes that agents act…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Alexander Tschantz , Beren Millidge , Anil K. Seth , Christopher L. Buckley

Reinforcement learning problems are often described through rewards that indicate if an agent has completed some task. This specification can yield desirable behavior, however many problems are difficult to specify in this manner, as one…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-08-15 Ashley Edwards , Charles Isbell , Atsuo Takanishi

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become an increasingly active area of research in recent years. Although there are many algorithms that allow an agent to solve tasks efficiently, they often ignore the possibility that prior experience…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-01-07 Francisco M. Garcia , Chris Nota , Philip S. Thomas

Reinforcement learning has emerged as an important approach for autonomous driving. A reward function is used in reinforcement learning to establish the learned skill objectives and guide the agent toward the optimal policy. Since…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Ahmed Abouelazm , Jonas Michel , J. Marius Zoellner

We consider a scenario in which two reinforcement learning agents repeatedly play a matrix game against each other and update their parameters after each round. The agents' decision-making is transparent to each other, which allows each…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-08-23 Adrian Hutter

Reward design is a critical part of the application of reinforcement learning, the performance of which strongly depends on how well the reward signal frames the goal of the designer and how well the signal assesses progress in reaching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Yixiang Wang , Yujing Hu , Feng Wu , Yingfeng Chen

Reinforcement learners are agents that learn to pick actions that lead to high reward. Ideally, the value of a reinforcement learner's policy approaches optimality--where the optimal informed policy is the one which maximizes reward.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-27 Michael K. Cohen , Elliot Catt , Marcus Hutter

Reinforcement learning systems will to a greater and greater extent make decisions that significantly impact the well-being of humans, and it is therefore essential that these systems make decisions that conform to our expectations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-18 Tue Herlau

As AI systems become increasingly autonomous, aligning their decision-making to human preferences is essential. In domains like autonomous driving or robotics, it is impossible to write down the reward function representing these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Ondrej Bajgar , Sid William Gould , Rohan Narayan Langford Mitta , Jonathon Liu , Oliver Newcombe , Jack Golden

In offline reinforcement learning (RL) agents are trained using a logged dataset. It appears to be the most natural route to attack real-life applications because in domains such as healthcare and robotics interactions with the environment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Ksenia Konyushkova , Konrad Zolna , Yusuf Aytar , Alexander Novikov , Scott Reed , Serkan Cabi , Nando de Freitas

We study misspecified Bayesian learning in principal-agent relationships, where an agent is assessed by an evaluator and rewarded by the market. The agent's outcome depends on their innate ability, costly effort -- whose effectiveness is…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-02 Federico Echenique , Anqi Li

Modern AI systems increasingly operate inside markets and institutions where data, behavior, and incentives are endogenous. This paper develops an economic foundation for multi-agent learning by studying a principal-agent interaction in a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-08 Nassim Helou

The ability of an AI agent to assist other agents, such as humans, is an important and challenging goal, which requires the assisting agent to reason about the behavior and infer the goals of the assisted agent. Training such an ability by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-10-05 Antti Keurulainen , Isak Westerlund , Samuel Kaski , Alexander Ilin

Current imitation learning techniques are too restrictive because they require the agent and expert to share the same action space. However, oftentimes agents that act differently from the expert can solve the task just as good. For…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-18 Nir Baram , Shie Mannor

We study reward design strategies for incentivizing a reinforcement learning agent to adopt a policy from a set of admissible policies. The goal of the reward designer is to modify the underlying reward function cost-efficiently while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-07 Kiarash Banihashem , Adish Singla , Jiarui Gan , Goran Radanovic

The rise of process data availability has recently led to the development of data-driven learning approaches. However, most of these approaches restrict the use of the learned model to predict the future of ongoing process executions. The…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Stefano Branchi , Chiara Di Francescomarino , Chiara Ghidini , David Massimo , Francesco Ricci , Massimiliano Ronzani

In the future, artificial learning agents are likely to become increasingly widespread in our society. They will interact with both other learning agents and humans in a variety of complex settings including social dilemmas. We consider the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Tobias Baumann , Thore Graepel , John Shawe-Taylor

Reward is the driving force for reinforcement-learning agents. This paper is dedicated to understanding the expressivity of reward as a way to capture tasks that we would want an agent to perform. We frame this study around three new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-19 David Abel , Will Dabney , Anna Harutyunyan , Mark K. Ho , Michael L. Littman , Doina Precup , Satinder Singh

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often exhibit learning behaviors that are not intuitively interpretable by human observers, which can result in suboptimal feedback in collaborative teaching settings. Yet, how humans perceive and…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Bernhard Hilpert , Muhan Hou , Kim Baraka , Joost Broekens