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Related papers: Quantifying Differences in Reward Functions

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Reward functions are a common way to specify the objective of a robot. As designing reward functions can be extremely challenging, a more promising approach is to directly learn reward functions from human teachers. Importantly, data from…

When deploying artificial agents in real-world environments where they interact with humans, it is crucial that their behavior is aligned with the values, social norms or other requirements of that environment. However, many environments…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Mattijs Baert , Pietro Mazzaglia , Sam Leroux , Pieter Simoens

Inverse optimal control, also known as inverse reinforcement learning, is the problem of recovering an unknown reward function in a Markov decision process from expert demonstrations of the optimal policy. We introduce a probabilistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-06-22 Sergey Levine , Vladlen Koltun

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

Rewards play a crucial role in reinforcement learning. To arrive at the desired policy, the design of a suitable reward function often requires significant domain expertise as well as trial-and-error. Here, we aim to minimize the effort…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-18 Zheng Wu , Wenzhao Lian , Vaibhav Unhelkar , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Stefan Schaal

We study the problem of model-free reinforcement learning, which is often solved following the principle of Generalized Policy Iteration (GPI). While GPI is typically an interplay between policy evaluation and policy improvement, most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Changnan Xiao , Haosen Shi , Jiajun Fan , Shihong Deng , Haiyan Yin

Despite the fact that deep reinforcement learning (RL) has surpassed human-level performances in various tasks, it still has several fundamental challenges. First, most RL methods require intensive data from the exploration of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Zhe Xu , Bo Wu , Aditya Ojha , Daniel Neider , Ufuk Topcu

We state the problem of inverse reinforcement learning in terms of preference elicitation, resulting in a principled (Bayesian) statistical formulation. This generalises previous work on Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning and allows us…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2011-06-30 Constantin Rothkopf , Christos Dimitrakakis

We study the problem of learning a good set of policies, so that when combined together, they can solve a wide variety of unseen reinforcement learning tasks with no or very little new data. Specifically, we consider the framework of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Safa Alver , Doina Precup

With reinforcement learning, an agent could learn complex behaviors from high-level abstractions of the task. However, exploration and reward shaping remained challenging for existing methods, especially in scenarios where the extrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Jie Chen , Wenjun Xu

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Minjae Cho , Huy Trong Tran

The optimal objective is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how policies are evaluated and optimized. While total return maximization is the ideal objective in RL, discounted return maximization is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Shuyu Yin , Fei Wen , Peilin Liu , Tao Luo

In a sequential decision-making problem, off-policy evaluation estimates the expected cumulative reward of a target policy using logged trajectory data generated from a different behavior policy, without execution of the target policy.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Jie Wang , Rui Gao , Hongyuan Zha

Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms that combine model-based planning and learned value/policy prior have gained significant recognition for their high data efficiency and superior performance in continuous control. However, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Haotian Lin , Pengcheng Wang , Jeff Schneider , Guanya Shi

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has made post-training highly effective when correctness can be checked automatically. However, many important model behaviors require satisfying several qualitative criteria at once.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Utkarsh Tyagi , Xingang Guo , MohammadHossein Rezaei , Daniel George , Anas Mahmoud , Jackson Lee , Bing Liu , Yunzhong He

We propose a metalearning approach for learning gradient-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. The idea is to evolve a differentiable loss function, such that an agent, which optimizes its policy to minimize this loss, will achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-01 Rein Houthooft , Richard Y. Chen , Phillip Isola , Bradly C. Stadie , Filip Wolski , Jonathan Ho , Pieter Abbeel

Efficient and robust policy transfer remains a key challenge for reinforcement learning to become viable for real-wold robotics. Policy transfer through warm initialization, imitation, or interacting over a large set of agents with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-12 Girish Joshi , Girish Chowdhary

Imitation learning methods seek to learn from an expert either through behavioral cloning (BC) of the policy or inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) of the reward. Such methods enable agents to learn complex tasks from humans that are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-07 Joe Watson , Sandy H. Huang , Nicolas Heess

Given that Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly permeates our lives, it is critical that we systematically align AI objectives with the goals and values of humans. The human-AI alignment problem stems from the impracticality of…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2022-07-05 John Nay , James Daily

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-18 Eli Friedman , Fred Fontaine