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Related papers: Understanding Learned Reward Functions

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Our goal is for agents to optimize the right reward function, despite how difficult it is for us to specify what that is. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) enables us to infer reward functions from demonstrations, but it usually assumes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Rohin Shah , Noah Gundotra , Pieter Abbeel , Anca D. Dragan

With the ever-increasing complexity of neural language models, practitioners have turned to methods for understanding the predictions of these models. One of the most well-adopted approaches for model interpretability is feature-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Muhammad Bilal Zafar , Michele Donini , Dylan Slack , Cédric Archambeau , Sanjiv Das , Krishnaram Kenthapadi

Extrinsic rewards can effectively guide reinforcement learning (RL) agents in specific tasks. However, extrinsic rewards frequently fall short in complex environments due to the significant human effort needed for their design and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Mingqi Yuan , Roger Creus Castanyer , Bo Li , Xin Jin , Wenjun Zeng , Glen Berseth

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to be often unsuccessful in environments with sparse extrinsic rewards. A possible countermeasure is to endow RL agents with an intrinsic reward function, or 'intrinsic motivation', which rewards the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Francesco Massari , Martin Biehl , Lisa Meeden , Ryota Kanai

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a general framework for adaptive control, which has proven to be efficient in many domains, e.g., board games, video games or autonomous vehicles. In such problems, an agent faces a sequential decision-making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Olivier Buffet , Olivier Pietquin , Paul Weng

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) typically relies on static reward models to align Large Language Models with human preferences. However, human values are inherently diverse and heterogeneous, and a single reward model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Zhenyu Sun , Zheng Xu , Ermin Wei

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to train an agent from a reward function in a given environment, Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) seeks to recover the reward function from observing an expert's behavior. It is well known that, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Paul Rolland , Luca Viano , Norman Schuerhoff , Boris Nikolov , Volkan Cevher

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

Designing an effective reward function has long been a challenge in reinforcement learning, particularly for complex tasks in unstructured environments. To address this, various learning paradigms have emerged that leverage different forms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Muhammad Qasim Elahi , Somtochukwu Oguchienti , Maheed H. Ahmed , Mahsa Ghasemi

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful technique for training intelligent agents, but understanding why these agents make specific decisions can be quite challenging. This lack of transparency in RL models has been a long-standing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Wenhao Lu , Xufeng Zhao , Thilo Fryen , Jae Hee Lee , Mengdi Li , Sven Magg , Stefan Wermter

Image-based reinforcement learning (RL) faces significant challenges in generalization when the visual environment undergoes substantial changes between training and deployment. Under such circumstances, learned policies may not perform…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-25 Weiyao Wang , Xinyuan Fang , Gregory D. Hager

In Reward Learning (ReL), we are given feedback on an unknown target reward, and the goal is to use this information to recover it in order to carry out some downstream application, e.g., planning. When the feedback is not informative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Filippo Lazzati , Alberto Maria Metelli

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a powerful technique to make large language models (LLMs) easier to use and more effective. A core piece of the RLHF process is the training and utilization of a model of…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Nathan Lambert , Thomas Krendl Gilbert , Tom Zick

Personalisation of products and services is fast becoming the driver of success in banking and commerce. Machine learning holds the promise of gaining a deeper understanding of and tailoring to customers' needs and preferences. Whereas…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-30 Charl Maree , Christian Omlin

No real-world reward function is perfect. Sensory errors and software bugs may result in RL agents observing higher (or lower) rewards than they should. For example, a reinforcement learning agent may prefer states where a sensory error…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-08-22 Tom Everitt , Victoria Krakovna , Laurent Orseau , Marcus Hutter , Shane Legg

Learning policies via preference-based reward learning is an increasingly popular method for customizing agent behavior, but has been shown anecdotally to be prone to spurious correlations and reward hacking behaviors. While much prior work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Jeremy Tien , Jerry Zhi-Yang He , Zackory Erickson , Anca D. Dragan , Daniel S. Brown

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms find applications in inventory control, recommender systems, vehicular traffic management, cloud computing and robotics. The real-world complications of many tasks arising in these domains makes them…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-03 Sindhu Padakandla

In offline reinforcement learning (RL) agents are trained using a logged dataset. It appears to be the most natural route to attack real-life applications because in domains such as healthcare and robotics interactions with the environment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Ksenia Konyushkova , Konrad Zolna , Yusuf Aytar , Alexander Novikov , Scott Reed , Serkan Cabi , Nando de Freitas

Preference-based reward learning is a popular technique for teaching robots and autonomous systems how a human user wants them to perform a task. Previous works have shown that actively synthesizing preference queries to maximize…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Evan Ellis , Gaurav R. Ghosal , Stuart J. Russell , Anca Dragan , Erdem Bıyık

Existing approaches to reward inference from behavior typically assume that humans provide demonstrations according to specific models of behavior. However, humans often indicate their goals through a wide range of behaviors, from actions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Will Schwarzer , Jordan Schneider , Philip S. Thomas , Scott Niekum