Related papers: Maximizing Information Gain in Partially Observabl…

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…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for robotic path planning in uncertain environments. However, the control policies trained for an RL agent crucially depend on user-defined, state-based reward functions. Poorly designed…

Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is widely used to study hidden or hard-to-reach populations by incentivizing study participants to recruit their social connections. The success and efficiency of RDS can depend critically on the nature of…

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to behave so as to maximise the sum of a suitable scalar function of state: the reward. These rewards are typically given and immutable. In this paper, we instead consider the proposition…

Static feature exclusion strategies often fail to prevent bias when hidden dependencies influence the model predictions. To address this issue, we explore a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that integrates bias mitigation and automated…

We study the use of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) as a tool for the recognition of agents' behavior on the basis of observation of their sequential decision behavior interacting with the environment. We model the problem faced by the…

The development of autonomous agents for complex, long-horizon tasks is a central goal in AI. However, dominant training paradigms face a critical limitation: reinforcement learning (RL) methods that optimize solely for final task success…

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for decision processes with non-Markovian reward, in which high-level knowledge of the task in the form of reward machines is available to the learner. We consider probabilistic reward machines with…

For sophisticated reinforcement learning (RL) systems to interact usefully with real-world environments, we need to communicate complex goals to these systems. In this work, we explore goals defined in terms of (non-expert) human…

In this thesis, we research learning algorithms for optimal decision making in two different contexts, Reinforcement Learning in Part I and Auction Design in Part II. Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning that is…

The deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) in the real world comes with challenges in calibrating user trust and expectations. As a step toward developing RL systems that are able to communicate their competencies, we present a method of…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents require the specification of a reward signal for learning behaviours. However, introduction of corrupt or stochastic rewards can yield high variance in learning. Such corruption may be a direct result of…

Consider the following instance of the Offline Meta Reinforcement Learning (OMRL) problem: given the complete training logs of $N$ conventional RL agents, trained on $N$ different tasks, design a meta-agent that can quickly maximize reward…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents have great successes in solving tasks with large observation and action spaces from limited feedback. Still, training the agents is data-intensive and there are no guarantees that the learned behavior is…

A long-term goal of language agents is to learn and improve through their own experience, ultimately outperforming humans in complex, real-world tasks. However, training agents from experience data with reinforcement learning remains…

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…

Reward function is essential in reinforcement learning (RL), serving as the guiding signal to incentivize agents to solve given tasks, however, is also notoriously difficult to design. In many cases, only imperfect rewards are available,…

Diffusion models excel at modeling complex data distributions, including those of images, proteins, and small molecules. However, in many cases, our goal is to model parts of the distribution that maximize certain properties: for example,…

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…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a general framework for adaptive control, which has proven to be efficient in many domains, e.g., board games, video games or autonomous vehicles. In such problems, an agent faces a sequential decision-making…