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Related papers: Understanding Learned Reward Functions

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We propose a method to capture the handling abilities of fast jet pilots in a software model via reinforcement learning (RL) from human preference feedback. We use pairwise preferences over simulated flight trajectories to learn an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Tom Bewley , Jonathan Lawry , Arthur Richards

A key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is reward (mis)specification, whereby imprecisely defined reward functions can result in unintended, possibly harmful, behaviours. Indeed, reward functions in RL are typically treated as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Daniel Donnelly , Angelo Ferrando , Francesco Belardinelli

The field of social robotics will likely need to depart from a paradigm of designed behaviours and imitation learning and adopt modern reinforcement learning (RL) methods to enable robots to interact fluidly and efficaciously with humans.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-02-02 Thomas Kingsford

Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-10 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

In some agent designs like inverse reinforcement learning an agent needs to learn its own reward function. Learning the reward function and optimising for it are typically two different processes, usually performed at different stages. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-04-29 Stuart Armstrong , Jan Leike , Laurent Orseau , Shane Legg

Providing a suitable reward function to reinforcement learning can be difficult in many real world applications. While inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) holds promise for automatically learning reward functions from demonstrations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Lantao Yu , Tianhe Yu , Chelsea Finn , Stefano Ermon

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…

Natural and formal languages provide an effective mechanism for humans to specify instructions and reward functions. We investigate how to generate policies via RL when reward functions are specified in a symbolic language captured by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-24 Andrew C. Li , Zizhao Chen , Pashootan Vaezipoor , Toryn Q. Klassen , Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Sheila A. McIlraith

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Daniel Shin , Anca D. Dragan , Daniel S. Brown

Reward function design and exploration time are arguably the biggest obstacles to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real world. In many real-world tasks, designing a reward function takes considerable hand…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-06-14 Pierre Sermanet , Kelvin Xu , Sergey Levine

We present a user study to investigate the impact of explanations on non-experts' understanding of reinforcement learning (RL) agents. We investigate both a common RL visualization, saliency maps (the focus of attention), and a more recent…

The complexity of designing reward functions has been a major obstacle to the wide application of deep reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. Describing an agent's desired behaviors and properties can be difficult, even for experts. A new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Wanqi Xue , Bo An , Shuicheng Yan , Zhongwen Xu

Reward functions are central in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding agents towards optimal decision-making. The complexity of RL tasks requires meticulously designed reward functions that effectively drive learning while avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Rati Devidze

Reward modeling has emerged as a crucial component in aligning large language models with human values. Significant attention has focused on using reward models as a means for fine-tuning generative models. However, the reward models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Brian Christian , Hannah Rose Kirk , Jessica A. F. Thompson , Christopher Summerfield , Tsvetomira Dumbalska

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

Reinforcement learning (RL), a common tool in decision making, learns control policies from various experiences based on the associated cumulative return/rewards without treating them differently. Humans, on the contrary, often learn to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

Reward models (RMs) are crucial for the training and inference-time scaling up of large language models (LLMs). However, existing reward models primarily focus on human preferences, neglecting verifiable correctness signals which have shown…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Hao Peng , Yunjia Qi , Xiaozhi Wang , Zijun Yao , Bin Xu , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

In complex real-world tasks such as robotic manipulation and autonomous driving, collecting expert demonstrations is often more straightforward than specifying precise learning objectives and task descriptions. Learning from expert data can…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Daulet Baimukashev , Gokhan Alcan , Kevin Sebastian Luck , Ville Kyrki

In many sequential decision making tasks, it is challenging to design reward functions that help an RL agent efficiently learn behavior that is considered good by the agent designer. A number of different formulations of the reward-design…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-25 Zeyu Zheng , Junhyuk Oh , Satinder Singh

Inferring reward functions from human behavior is at the center of value alignment - aligning AI objectives with what we, humans, actually want. But doing so relies on models of how humans behave given their objectives. After decades of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Joey Hong , Kush Bhatia , Anca Dragan