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We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Tsung-Yen Yang , Justinian Rosca , Karthik Narasimhan , Peter J. Ramadge

A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-21 Paulo Rauber , Avinash Ummadisingu , Filipe Mutz , Juergen Schmidhuber

Consider a prosthetic arm, learning to adapt to its user's control signals. We propose Interaction-Grounded Learning for this novel setting, in which a learner's goal is to interact with the environment with no grounding or explicit reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-15 Tengyang Xie , John Langford , Paul Mineiro , Ida Momennejad

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

Learning to control an environment without hand-crafted rewards or expert data remains challenging and is at the frontier of reinforcement learning research. We present an unsupervised learning algorithm to train agents to achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-29 David Warde-Farley , Tom Van de Wiele , Tejas Kulkarni , Catalin Ionescu , Steven Hansen , Volodymyr Mnih

Estimation of individual treatment effects is commonly used as the basis for contextual decision making in fields such as healthcare, education, and economics. However, it is often sufficient for the decision maker to have estimates of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-13 Maggie Makar , Fredrik D. Johansson , John Guttag , David Sontag

This paper argues that Active Inference (AIF) provides a crucial foundation for developing autonomous AI agents capable of learning from experience without continuous human reward engineering. As AI systems begin to exhaust high-quality…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Bo Wen

For most reinforcement learning approaches, the learning is performed by maximizing an accumulative reward that is expectedly and manually defined for specific tasks. However, in real world, rewards are emergent phenomena from the complex…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-05-23 Min Xu

A key impediment to reinforcement learning (RL) in real applications with limited, batch data is defining a reward function that reflects what we implicitly know about reasonable behaviour for a task and allows for robust off-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Niranjani Prasad , Barbara E Engelhardt , Finale Doshi-Velez

Flexible, goal-directed behavior is a fundamental aspect of human life. Based on the free energy minimization principle, the theory of active inference formalizes the generation of such behavior from a computational neuroscience…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-03 Fedor Scholz , Christian Gumbsch , Sebastian Otte , Martin V. Butz

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Banafsheh Rafiee , Sina Ghiassian , Jun Jin , Richard Sutton , Jun Luo , Adam White

Adequately assigning credit to actions for future outcomes based on their contributions is a long-standing open challenge in Reinforcement Learning. The assumptions of the most commonly used credit assignment method are disadvantageous in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Mátyás Schubert

The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going through a period of great expectations, introducing a certain level of anxiety in research, business and also policy. This anxiety is further energised by an AI race narrative that makes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-09 The Anh Han , Luis Moniz Pereira , Tom Lenaerts , Francisco C. Santos

We build upon recent work [Kleinberg and Oren, 2014, Kleinberg et al., 2016, 2017] that considers present biased agents, who place more weight on costs they must incur now than costs they will incur in the future. They consider a graph…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-01-17 Aditya Saraf , Anna R. Karlin , Jamie Morgenstern

Reinforcement learning requires interaction with an environment, which is expensive for robots. This constraint necessitates approaches that work with limited environmental interaction by maximizing the reuse of previous experiences. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Benedict Quartey , Ankit Shah , George Konidaris

Backdoor attacks on reinforcement learning implant a backdoor in a victim agent's policy. Once the victim observes the trigger signal, it will switch to the abnormal mode and fail its task. Most of the attacks assume the adversary can…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Shuo Chen , Yue Qiu , Jie Zhang

In dynamic mechanism design literature, one critical aspect has been typically ignored-the agents' periodic participation, which they can adapt and plan strategically. We propose a framework for dynamic principal-multiagent problems,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Tao Zhang , Quanyan Zhu

We study repeated task assignment as an instrument for providing effort incentives. Unlike traditional incentive instruments, assignment of a task both determines who produces and provides incentives, and incentives for one worker spill…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-03 Yonghang Ji , Allen Vong

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

Efficient exploration is necessary to achieve good sample efficiency for reinforcement learning in general. From small, tabular settings such as gridworlds to large, continuous and sparse reward settings such as robotic object manipulation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-20 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Emma Brunskill