English
Related papers

Related papers: Quantifying Differences in Reward Functions

200 papers

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Neta Glazer , Aviv Navon , Aviv Shamsian , Ethan Fetaya

We investigate the explainability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies from a temporal perspective, focusing on the sequence of future outcomes associated with individual actions. In RL, value functions compress information about rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-08 Franco Ruggeri , Alessio Russo , Rafia Inam , Karl Henrik Johansson

We tackle the issue of finding a good policy when the number of policy updates is limited. This is done by approximating the expected policy reward as a sequence of concave lower bounds which can be efficiently maximized, drastically…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-12-30 Nicolas Le Roux

Complex planning and scheduling problems have long been solved using various optimization or heuristic approaches. In recent years, imitation learning that aims to learn from expert demonstrations has been proposed as a viable alternative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Qian Shao , Pradeep Varakantham , Shih-Fen Cheng

Because it is difficult to precisely specify complex objectives, reinforcement learning policies are often optimized using proxy reward functions that only approximate the true goal. However, optimizing proxy rewards frequently leads to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Cassidy Laidlaw , Shivam Singhal , Anca Dragan

In inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), a learning agent infers a reward function encoding the underlying task using demonstrations from experts. However, many existing IRL techniques make the often unrealistic assumption that the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-04 Franck Djeumou , Christian Ellis , Murat Cubuktepe , Craig Lennon , Ufuk Topcu

There exist a number of reinforcement learning algorithms which learnby climbing the gradient of expected reward. Their long-runconvergence has been proved, even in partially observableenvironments with non-deterministic actions, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-14 Lex Weaver , Nigel Tao

Standard deep reinforcement learning algorithms use a shared representation for the policy and value function, especially when training directly from images. However, we argue that more information is needed to accurately estimate the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Roberta Raileanu , Rob Fergus

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

Behavioral skills or policies for autonomous agents are conventionally learned from reward functions, via reinforcement learning, or from demonstrations, via imitation learning. However, both modes of task specification have their…

Sample efficiency and scalability to a large number of agents are two important goals for multi-agent reinforcement learning systems. Recent works got us closer to those goals, addressing non-stationarity of the environment from a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-04 Iou-Jen Liu , Raymond A. Yeh , Alexander G. Schwing

The aim of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is to infer a reward function $R$ from a policy $\pi$. This problem is difficult, for several reasons. First of all, there are typically multiple reward functions which are compatible with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Joar Skalse , Alessandro Abate

For a real-world decision-making problem, the reward function often needs to be engineered or learned. A popular approach is to utilize human feedback to learn a reward function for training. The most straightforward way to do so is to ask…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Xiang Ji , Huazheng Wang , Minshuo Chen , Tuo Zhao , Mengdi Wang

Reinforcement-learning agents seek to maximize a reward signal through environmental interactions. As humans, our job in the learning process is to design reward functions to express desired behavior and enable the agent to learn such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Zhiyuan Zhou , Shreyas Sundara Raman , Henry Sowerby , Michael L. Littman

Collaboration with artificial intelligence (AI) has improved human decision-making across various domains by leveraging the complementary capabilities of humans and AI. Yet, humans systematically overrely on AI advice, even when their…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Joshua Holstein , Patrick Hemmer , Gerhard Satzger , Wei Sun

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems can be complex and non-interpretable, making it challenging for non-AI experts to understand or intervene in their decisions. This is due in part to the sequential nature of RL in which actions are chosen…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Amal Alabdulkarim , Madhuri Singh , Gennie Mansi , Kaely Hall , Upol Ehsan , Mark O. Riedl

We consider the problem of finding a policy that maximizes an expected reward throughout the trajectory of an agent that interacts with an unknown environment. Frequently denoted Reinforcement Learning, this framework suffers from the need…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-30 Juan Cervino , Harshat Kumar , Alejandro Ribeiro

Reinforcement Learning algorithms aim to learn optimal control strategies through iterative interactions with an environment. A critical element in this process is the experience replay buffer, which stores past experiences, allowing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Hoda Yamani , Yuning Xing , Lee Violet C. Ong , Bruce A. MacDonald , Henry Williams

Autonomous agents optimize the reward function we give them. What they don't know is how hard it is for us to design a reward function that actually captures what we want. When designing the reward, we might think of some specific training…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Dylan Hadfield-Menell , Smitha Milli , Pieter Abbeel , Stuart Russell , Anca Dragan

Standard computer vision systems assume access to intelligently captured inputs (e.g., photos from a human photographer), yet autonomously capturing good observations is a major challenge in itself. We address the problem of learning to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-06-28 Santhosh K. Ramakrishnan , Dinesh Jayaraman , Kristen Grauman