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In performative learning, the data distribution reacts to the deployed model - for example, because strategic users adapt their features to game it - which creates a more complex dynamic than in classical supervised learning. One should…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Edwige Cyffers , Alireza Mirrokni , Marco Mondelli

Reinforcement-learning agents seek to maximize a reward signal through environmental interactions. As humans, our job in the learning process is to design reward functions to express desired behavior and enable the agent to learn such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Zhiyuan Zhou , Shreyas Sundara Raman , Henry Sowerby , Michael L. Littman

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

The effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in continuous control robotics tasks is mainly dependent on the design of the underlying reward function, which is highly prone to reward hacking. A misalignment between the reward…

One obstacle to applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems is the lack of suitable reward functions. Designing such reward functions is difficult in part because the user only has an implicit understanding of the task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Jan Leike , David Krueger , Tom Everitt , Miljan Martic , Vishal Maini , Shane Legg

We present SafeLife, a publicly available reinforcement learning environment that tests the safety of reinforcement learning agents. It contains complex, dynamic, tunable, procedurally generated levels with many opportunities for unsafe…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Carroll L. Wainwright , Peter Eckersley

Despite impressive results using reinforcement learning to solve complex problems from scratch, in robotics this has still been largely limited to model-based learning with very informative reward functions. One of the major challenges is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-19 Steve Heim , Alexander Spröwitz

Reward functions are central in specifying the task we want a reinforcement learning agent to perform. Given a task and desired optimal behavior, we study the problem of designing informative reward functions so that the designed rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Rati Devidze , Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Adish Singla

Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique for developing new robot behaviors. However, typical lack of safety guarantees constitutes a hurdle for its practical application on real robots. To address this issue, safe reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-29 Maeva Guerrier , Hassan Fouad , Giovanni Beltrame

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved great success in solving complicated decision-making problems. Despite the successes, DRL is frequently criticized for many reasons, e.g., data inefficient, inflexible and intractable reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Weiqin Chen

Reinforcement learning (RL) is recognized as lacking generalization and robustness under environmental perturbations, which excessively restricts its application for real-world robotics. Prior work claimed that adding regularization to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Yuan Zhang , Jianhong Wang , Joschka Boedecker

Reward functions are notoriously difficult to specify, especially for tasks with complex goals. Reward learning approaches attempt to infer reward functions from human feedback and preferences. Prior works on reward learning have mainly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-11 Lev McKinney , Yawen Duan , David Krueger , Adam Gleave

Reinforcement learning is increasingly used for code-centric tasks. These tasks include code generation, summarization, understanding, repair, testing, and optimization. This trend is growing faster with large language models and autonomous…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Md Rayhanul Masud , Azmine Toushik Wasi , Salman Rahman , Md Rizwan Parvez

Many real-world systems problems require reasoning about the long term consequences of actions taken to configure and manage the system. These problems with delayed and often sequentially aggregated reward, are often inherently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-06 Ameer Haj-Ali , Nesreen K. Ahmed , Ted Willke , Joseph Gonzalez , Krste Asanovic , Ion Stoica

Two main challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL) are designing appropriate reward functions and ensuring the safety of the learned policy. To address these challenges, we present a theoretical framework for Inverse Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Maryam Kamgarpour

Reward function specification can be difficult. Rewarding the agent for making a widget may be easy, but penalizing the multitude of possible negative side effects is hard. In toy environments, Attainable Utility Preservation (AUP) avoided…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Alexander Matt Turner , Neale Ratzlaff , Prasad Tadepalli

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

In order to solve a task using reinforcement learning, it is necessary to first formalise the goal of that task as a reward function. However, for many real-world tasks, it is very difficult to manually specify a reward function that never…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-13 Joar Skalse , Lucy Farnik , Sumeet Ramesh Motwani , Erik Jenner , Adam Gleave , Alessandro Abate

Real-world robotic tasks require complex reward functions. When we define the problem the robot needs to solve, we pretend that a designer specifies this complex reward exactly, and it is set in stone from then on. In practice, however,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Jerry Zhi-Yang He , Anca D. Dragan

In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Grigorii Veviurko , Wendelin Böhmer , Mathijs de Weerdt