Related papers: Expected Eligibility Traces
Multi-step agentic reinforcement learning benefits from fine-grained credit assignment, yet existing approaches offer limited options: critic-free methods like GRPO assign a uniform advantage to every action in a trajectory, while learned…
Many transfer problems require re-using previously optimal decisions for solving new tasks, which suggests the need for learning algorithms that can modify the mechanisms for choosing certain actions independently of those for choosing…
A growing number of universities worldwide use various forms of online and blended learning as part of their academic curricula. Furthermore, the recent changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a drastic increase in importance…
As reinforcement learning agents are tasked with solving more challenging and diverse tasks, the ability to incorporate prior knowledge into the learning system and to exploit reusable structure in solution space is likely to become…
Reward machines are automaton-like structures that capture the memory required to accomplish a multi-stage task. When combined with reinforcement learning or optimal control methods, they can be used to synthesize robot policies to achieve…
Random delays weaken the temporal correspondence between actions and subsequent state feedback, making it difficult for agents to identify the true propagation process of action effects. In cross-task scenarios, changes in task objectives…
As AI agents generate increasingly sophisticated behaviors, manually encoding human preferences to guide these agents becomes more challenging. To address this, it has been suggested that agents instead learn preferences from human choice…
Two of the most studied extensions of trace and testing equivalences to nondeterministic and probabilistic processes induce distinctions that have been questioned and lack properties that are desirable. Probabilistic trace-distribution…
Temporal-Difference (TD) learning is a general and very useful tool for estimating the value function of a given policy, which in turn is required to find good policies. Generally speaking, TD learning updates states whenever they are…
Despite the excelling performance of machine learning models, understanding their decisions remains a long-standing goal. Although commonly used attribution methods from explainable AI attempt to address this issue, they typically rely on…
Reinforcement learning typically assumes that the state update from the previous actions happens instantaneously, and thus can be used for making future decisions. However, this may not always be true. When the state update is not…
We address the problem of incremental sequence classification, where predictions are updated as new elements in the sequence are revealed. Drawing on temporal-difference learning from reinforcement learning, we identify a…
Learning-based approaches for solving large sequential decision making problems have become popular in recent years. The resulting agents perform differently and their characteristics depend on those of the underlying learning approach.…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to learn a reward function and a corresponding policy that best fit the demonstrated trajectories of an expert. However, current IRL works cannot learn incrementally from an ongoing trajectory…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the careful design of the reward function. However, accurately assigning rewards to each state-action pair in Long-Term Reinforcement Learning (LTRL) tasks remains a significant challenge. As a…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become a common way to improve explicit reasoning in large language models, but final-answer correctness alone does not reveal whether the reasoning trace is faithful, reliable, or useful…
In this work, we study the credit assignment problem in reward augmented maximum likelihood (RAML) learning, and establish a theoretical equivalence between the token-level counterpart of RAML and the entropy regularized reinforcement…
This paper presents a novel framework for automatic learning of complex strategies in human decision making. The task that we are interested in is to better facilitate long term planning for complex, multi-step events. We observe temporal…
Temporal point process is an expressive tool for modeling event sequences over time. In this paper, we take a reinforcement learning view whereby the observed sequences are assumed to be generated from a mixture of latent policies. The…
Trace theory is a principled framework for defining equivalence relations for concurrent program runs based on a commutativity relation over the set of atomic steps taken by individual program threads. Its simplicity, elegance, and…