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Reinforcement learning has recently experienced increased prominence in the machine learning community. There are many approaches to solving reinforcement learning problems with new techniques developed constantly. When solving problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-14 Belinda Stapelberg , Katherine M. Malan

We study black-box reward poisoning attacks against reinforcement learning (RL), in which an adversary aims to manipulate the rewards to mislead a sequence of RL agents with unknown algorithms to learn a nefarious policy in an environment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-18 Amin Rakhsha , Xuezhou Zhang , Xiaojin Zhu , Adish Singla

Recommender systems have been widely applied in different real-life scenarios to help us find useful information. In particular, Reinforcement Learning (RL) based recommender systems have become an emerging research topic in recent years,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Yuanguo Lin , Yong Liu , Fan Lin , Lixin Zou , Pengcheng Wu , Wenhua Zeng , Huanhuan Chen , Chunyan Miao

Crowd simulation is important for video-games design, since it enables to populate virtual worlds with autonomous avatars that navigate in a human-like manner. Reinforcement learning has shown great potential in simulating virtual crowds,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-25 Ariel Kwiatkowski , Vicky Kalogeiton , Julien Pettré , Marie-Paule Cani

Reward hacking -- where RL agents exploit gaps in misspecified reward functions -- has been widely observed, but not yet systematically studied. To understand how reward hacking arises, we construct four RL environments with misspecified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Alexander Pan , Kush Bhatia , Jacob Steinhardt

The main drawbacks of input-output linearizing controllers are the need for precise dynamics models and not being able to account for input constraints. Model uncertainty is common in almost every robotic application and input saturation is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-05-05 Fernando Castañeda , Mathias Wulfman , Ayush Agrawal , Tyler Westenbroek , Claire J. Tomlin , S. Shankar Sastry , Koushil Sreenath

Because it is difficult to precisely specify complex objectives, reinforcement learning policies are often optimized using proxy reward functions that only approximate the true goal. However, optimizing proxy rewards frequently leads to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Cassidy Laidlaw , Shivam Singhal , Anca Dragan

We study reward design strategies for incentivizing a reinforcement learning agent to adopt a policy from a set of admissible policies. The goal of the reward designer is to modify the underlying reward function cost-efficiently while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-07 Kiarash Banihashem , Adish Singla , Jiarui Gan , Goran Radanovic

In recent years, significant progress has been made in solving challenging problems across various domains using deep reinforcement learning (RL). Reproducing existing work and accurately judging the improvements offered by novel methods is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-31 Peter Henderson , Riashat Islam , Philip Bachman , Joelle Pineau , Doina Precup , David Meger

There is a surge of interest in using formal languages such as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) to precisely and succinctly specify complex tasks and derive reward functions for Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, existing methods often assign…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Minjae Kwon , Ingy ElSayed-Aly , Lu Feng

Rewards serve as proxies for human preferences and play a crucial role in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). However, if these rewards are inherently imperfect, exhibiting various biases, they can adversely affect the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Sheng Ouyang , Yulan Hu , Ge Chen , Qingyang Li , Fuzheng Zhang , Yong Liu

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been a main driver of recent breakthroughs in large reasoning models. Yet it remains a mystery how rewards based solely on final outcomes can help overcome the long-horizon barrier…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Yu Huang , Zixin Wen , Yuejie Chi , Yuting Wei , Aarti Singh , Yingbin Liang , Yuxin Chen

Reinforcement learning for the optimization of quantum circuits uses an agent whose goal is to maximize the value of a reward function that decides what is correct and what is wrong during the exploration of the search space. It is an open…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-11-22 Ioana Moflic , Alexandru Paler

To convey desired behavior to a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, a designer must choose a reward function for the environment, arguably the most important knob designers have in interacting with RL agents. Although many reward functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Henry Sowerby , Zhiyuan Zhou , Michael L. Littman

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) techniques deal with the problem of deducing a reward function that explains the behavior of an expert agent who is assumed to act optimally in an underlying unknown task. In several problems of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Riccardo Poiani , Gabriele Curti , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

Constrained Reinforcement Learning has been employed to enforce safety constraints on policy through the use of expected cost constraints. The key challenge is in handling expected cost accumulated using the policy and not just in a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Hao Jiang , Tien Mai , Pradeep Varakantham , Minh Huy Hoang

A misspecified reward can degrade sample efficiency and induce undesired behaviors in reinforcement learning (RL) problems. We propose symbolic reward machines for incorporating high-level task knowledge when specifying the reward signals.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-22 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

Reinforcement learning is a promising framework for solving control problems, but its use in practical situations is hampered by the fact that reward functions are often difficult to engineer. Specifying goals and tasks for autonomous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-22 Justin Fu , Anoop Korattikara , Sergey Levine , Sergio Guadarrama

Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the active fields in machine learning, demonstrating remarkable potential in tackling real-world challenges. Despite its promising prospects, this methodology has encountered with issues and challenges,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Alireza Rashidi Laleh , Majid Nili Ahmadabadi

When we design and deploy an Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, reward functions motivates agents to achieve an objective. An incorrect or incomplete specification of the objective can result in behavior that does not align with human…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Zhaoyue Wang