Related papers: Avoiding Side Effects in Complex Environments
To regulate a social system comprised of self-interested agents, economic incentives are often required to induce a desirable outcome. This incentive design problem naturally possesses a bilevel structure, in which a designer modifies the…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown its strength in challenging sequential decision-making problems. The reward function in RL is crucial to the learning performance, as it serves as a measure of the task completion degree. In real-world…
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…
Although recent model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have been shown to be capable of mastering complicated decision-making tasks, the sample complexity of these methods has remained a hurdle to utilizing them in many real-world…
Designing a good reward function is essential to robot planning and reinforcement learning, but it can also be challenging and frustrating. The reward needs to work across multiple different environments, and that often requires many…
This paper investigates whether learning contingency-awareness and controllable aspects of an environment can lead to better exploration in reinforcement learning. To investigate this question, we consider an instantiation of this…
Deep Reinforcement Learning is a promising tool for robotic control, yet practical application is often hindered by the difficulty of designing effective reward functions. Real-world tasks typically require optimizing multiple objectives…
Crowd simulation is important for video-games design, since it enables to populate virtual worlds with autonomous avatars that navigate in a human-like manner. Reinforcement learning has shown great potential in simulating virtual crowds,…
Real-world reinforcement learning (RL) environments, whether in robotics or industrial settings, often involve non-visual observations and require not only efficient but also reliable and thus interpretable and flexible RL approaches. To…
Robotics Reinforcement Learning (RL) often relies on carefully engineered auxiliary rewards to supplement sparse primary learning objectives to compensate for the lack of large-scale, real-world, trial-and-error data. While these auxiliary…
In repeated games, such as auctions, players rely on autonomous learning agents to choose their actions. We study settings in which players have their agents make monetary transfers to other agents during play at their own expense, in order…
In this paper, we explore an approach to auxiliary task discovery in reinforcement learning based on ideas from representation learning. Auxiliary tasks tend to improve data efficiency by forcing the agent to learn auxiliary prediction and…
Transfer of recent advances in deep reinforcement learning to real-world applications is hindered by high data demands and thus low efficiency and scalability. Through independent improvements of components such as replay buffers or more…
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…
Many reinforcement-learning researchers treat the reward function as a part of the environment, meaning that the agent can only know the reward of a state if it encounters that state in a trial run. However, we argue that this is an…
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…
Designers of AI agents often iterate on the reward function in a trial-and-error process until they get the desired behavior, but this only guarantees good behavior in the training environment. We propose structuring this process as a…
Potential-based reward shaping is commonly used to incorporate prior knowledge of how to solve the task into reinforcement learning because it can formally guarantee policy invariance. As such, the optimal policy and the ordering of…
One of the challenges in applying reinforcement learning in a complex real-world environment lies in providing the agent with a sufficiently detailed reward function. Any misalignment between the reward and the desired behavior can result…
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…