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Algorithmic collusion has emerged as a central question in AI: Will the interaction between different AI agents deployed in markets lead to collusion? More generally, understanding how emergent behavior, be it a cartel or market dominance…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Ziyi Wang , Carmine Ventre , Maria Polukarov

The correct specification of reward models is a well-known challenge in reinforcement learning. Hand-crafted reward functions often lead to inefficient or suboptimal policies and may not be aligned with user values. Reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Muhan Lin , Shuyang Shi , Yue Guo , Behdad Chalaki , Vaishnav Tadiparthi , Ehsan Moradi Pari , Simon Stepputtis , Joseph Campbell , Katia Sycara

Text-based games are a popular testbed for language-based reinforcement learning (RL). In previous work, deep Q-learning is commonly used as the learning agent. Q-learning algorithms are challenging to apply to complex real-world domains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Weichen Li , Rati Devidze , Sophie Fellenz

"Intrinsic motivation" refers to the capacity for intelligent systems to be motivated endogenously, i.e. by features of agential architecture itself rather than by learned associations between action and reward. This paper views active…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-02-14 Alex B. Kiefer

Intrinsic motivations are receiving increasing attention, i.e. behavioral incentives that are not engineered, but emerge from the interaction of an agent with its surroundings. In this work we study the emergence of behaviors driven by one…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Tristan Shah , Ilya Nemenman , Daniel Polani , Stas Tiomkin

We argue that 3-D first-person video games are a challenging environment for real-time multi-modal reasoning. We first describe our dataset of human game-play, collected across a large variety of 3-D first-person games, which is both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Yuguang Yue , Irakli Salia , Samuel Hunt , Christopher Green , Wenzhe Shi , Jonathan J Hunt

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

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) policies, although optimal in terms of task rewards, may not align with the personal preferences of human users. To ensure this alignment, a naive solution would be to retrain the agent using a reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Ajsal Shereef Palattuparambil , Thommen George Karimpanal , Santu Rana

We pose an active perception problem where an autonomous agent actively interacts with a second agent with potentially adversarial behaviors. Given the uncertainty in the intent of the other agent, the objective is to collect further…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-09-20 Macheng Shen , Jonathan P How

Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and even recent state-of-the art curiosity-based methods rely on the simple epsilon-greedy strategy to generate novelty. We argue that pure random walks do not succeed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-06 Fabio Pardo , Vitaly Levdik , Petar Kormushev

Critical sectors of human society are progressing toward the adoption of powerful artificial intelligence (AI) agents, which are trained individually on behalf of self-interested principals but deployed in a shared environment. Short of…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Jiachen Yang , Ethan Wang , Rakshit Trivedi , Tuo Zhao , Hongyuan Zha

Infants are experts at playing, with an amazing ability to generate novel structured behaviors in unstructured environments that lack clear extrinsic reward signals. We seek to mathematically formalize these abilities using a neural network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-01 Nick Haber , Damian Mrowca , Li Fei-Fei , Daniel L. K. Yamins

Sample inefficiency of deep reinforcement learning methods is a major obstacle for their use in real-world applications. In this work, we show how human demonstrations can improve final performance of agents on the Minecraft minigame…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-16 Christian Scheller , Yanick Schraner , Manfred Vogel

Financial markets investors are involved in many games -- they must interact with other agents to achieve their goals. Among them are those directly connected with their activity on markets but one cannot neglect other aspects that…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2008-12-02 Edward W. Piotrowski , Jan Sladkowski , Anna Szczypinska

Efficient exploration in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a challenging problem when receiving only a team reward, especially in environments with sparse rewards. A powerful method to mitigate this issue involves crafting dense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Xuefei Wu , Xiao Yin , Yuanyang Zhu , Chunlin Chen

We seek to align agent behavior with a user's objectives in a reinforcement learning setting with unknown dynamics, an unknown reward function, and unknown unsafe states. The user knows the rewards and unsafe states, but querying the user…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2021-03-26 Siddharth Reddy , Anca D. Dragan , Sergey Levine , Shane Legg , Jan Leike

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

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Minjae Cho , Huy Trong Tran

Reinforcement learning algorithms describe how an agent can learn an optimal action policy in a sequential decision process, through repeated experience. In a given environment, the agent policy provides him some running and terminal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-03-24 Arthur Charpentier , Romuald Elie , Carl Remlinger

Intrinsic motivation enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to explore when rewards are very sparse, where traditional exploration heuristics such as Boltzmann or e-greedy would typically fail. However, intrinsic exploration is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Philippe Morere , Fabio Ramos