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Recently, there has been a surge in interest in safe and robust techniques within reinforcement learning (RL). Current notions of risk in RL fail to capture the potential for systemic failures such as abrupt stoppages from system failures…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-10-09 David Mguni

This article studies the problem of evaluating the information that a Principal lacks when establishing an incentive contract with an Agent whose effort is not observable. The Principal ("she") pays a continuous rent to the Agent ("he"),…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-10 Ishak Hajjej , Caroline Hillairet , Mohamed Mnif

We study a class of reinforcement learning problems where the reward signals for policy learning are generated by an internal reward model that is dependent on and jointly optimized with the policy. This interdependence between the policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Mengdi Li , Xufeng Zhao , Jae Hee Lee , Cornelius Weber , Stefan Wermter

This paper investigates a robust incentive Stackelberg stochastic differential game problem for a linear-quadratic mean field system, where the model uncertainty appears in the drift term of the leader's state equation. Moreover, both the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-31 Na Xiang , Jingtao Shi

In many social dilemmas, individuals tend to generate a situation with low payoffs instead of a system optimum ("tragedy of the commons"). Is the routing of traffic a similar problem? In order to address this question, we present…

Physics and Society · Physics 2007-05-23 Dirk Helbing , Martin Schonhof , Hans-Ulrich Stark , Janusz A. Holyst

Competition is ubiquitous in many complex biological, social, and technological systems, playing an integral role in the evolutionary dynamics of the systems. It is often useful to determine the dominance hierarchy or the rankings of the…

Physics and Society · Physics 2019-01-09 Seungkyu Shin , Sebastian E. Ahnert , Juyong Park

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

Reward models are a standard tool to score responses from LLMs. Reward models are built to rank responses to a fixed prompt sampled from a single model, for example to choose the best of n sampled responses. In this paper, we study whether…

In this work, we study sequential contracts under matroid constraints. In the sequential setting, an agent can take actions one by one. After each action, the agent observes the stochastic value of the action and then decides which action…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Kanstantsin Pashkovich , Jacob Skitsko , Yun Xing

A version of the secretary problem is considered. The ranks of items, whose values are independent, identically distributed random variables $X_1,X_2,...,X_n$ from a uniform distribution on $[0; 1]$, are observed sequentially by the grader.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-11-23 Krzysztof Szajowski

A principal contracts with an agent who sequentially searches over projects to generate a prize. The principal initially knows only one of the agent's available projects and evaluates a contract by its worst-case performance. We…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-09-17 Théo Durandard , Udayan Vaidya , Boli Xu

Two-vehicle racing is natural example of a competitive dynamic game. As with most dynamic games, there are many ways in which the underlying solution concept can be structured, resulting in different equilibrium concepts. The assumed…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Andrew Cinar , Forrest Laine

This paper studies competitions with rank-based reward among a large number of teams. Within each sizable team, we consider a mean-field contribution game in which each team member contributes to the jump intensity of a common Poisson…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Xiang Yu , Yuchong Zhang , Zhou Zhou

We derive an optimal strategy in the popular Deal or No Deal game show. Q-learning quantifies the continuation value inherent in sequential decision making and we use this to analyze contestants risky choices. Given their choices and…

Applications · Statistics 2011-10-06 Laszlo Korsos , Nicholas G. Polson

Motivated by applications such as online labor markets we consider a variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where we have a collection of arms representing strategic agents with different performance characteristics. The…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Seyed A. Esmaeili , Suho Shin , Aleksandrs Slivkins

This work considers a repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal can only interact with her environment through the agent. The principal and the agent have misaligned objectives and the choice of action is only left to the…

We consider the problem of sequentially making decisions that are rewarded by "successes" and "failures" which can be predicted through an unknown relationship that depends on a partially controllable vector of attributes for each instance.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-18 Yingfei Wang , Chu Wang , Warren Powell

Mechanism design is a well-established game-theoretic paradigm for designing games to achieve desired outcomes. This paper addresses a closely related but distinct concept, equilibrium design. Unlike mechanism design, the designer's…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Muhammad Najib , Giuseppe Perelli

Many biological, psychological and economic experiments have been designed where an organism or individual must choose between two options that have the same expected reward but differ in the variance of reward received. In this way,…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2018-09-20 Jared M. Field , Michael B. Bonsall

Learning about many things can provide numerous benefits to a reinforcement learning system. For example, learning many auxiliary value functions, in addition to optimizing the environmental reward, appears to improve both exploration and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Cam Linke , Nadia M. Ady , Martha White , Thomas Degris , Adam White