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Related papers: Adaptive Pairwise Weights for Temporal Credit Assi…

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We address the problem of credit assignment in reinforcement learning and explore fundamental questions regarding the way in which an agent can best use additional computation to propagate new information, by planning with internal models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Veronica Chelu , Doina Precup , Hado van Hasselt

Designing dense rewards is crucial for reinforcement learning (RL), yet in robotics it often demands extensive manual effort and lacks scalability. One promising solution is to view task progress as a dense reward signal, as it quantifies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Yuyang Liu , Chuan Wen , Yihang Hu , Dinesh Jayaraman , Yang Gao

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that users specify tasks by manually writing down a reward function. However, this process can be laborious and demands considerable technical expertise. Can we devise RL algorithms that instead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

The standard feedback model of reinforcement learning requires revealing the reward of every visited state-action pair. However, in practice, it is often the case that such frequent feedback is not available. In this work, we take a first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-08 Yonathan Efroni , Nadav Merlis , Shie Mannor

The main challenge in developing effective reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines is often the design and tuning the reward functions. Well-designed shaping reward can lead to significantly faster learning. Naively formulated rewards,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-20 Se Hwan Jeon , Steve Heim , Charles Khazoom , Sangbae Kim

This paper proposes a new reinforcement learning with hyperbolic discounting. Combining a new temporal difference error with the hyperbolic discounting in recursive manner and reward-punishment framework, a new scheme to learn the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Taisuke Kobayashi

Designing optimal reward functions has been desired but extremely difficult in reinforcement learning (RL). When it comes to modern complex tasks, sophisticated reward functions are widely used to simplify policy learning yet even a tiny…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Ning Wei , Jiahua Liang , Di Xie , Shiliang Pu

Potential heuristics for state-space search are defined as weighted sums over simple state features. Atomic features consider the value of a single state variable in a factored state representation, while binary features consider joint…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-09-27 Florian Pommerening , Malte Helmert , Blai Bonet

Social goods, such as healthcare, smart city, and information networks, often produce ordered event data in continuous time. The generative processes of these event data can be very complex, requiring flexible models to capture their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-29 Shuang Li , Shuai Xiao , Shixiang Zhu , Nan Du , Yao Xie , Le Song

The subject of this paper is reinforcement learning. Policies are considered here that produce actions based on states and random elements autocorrelated in subsequent time instants. Consequently, an agent learns from experiments that are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-11 Marcin Szulc , Jakub Łyskawa , Paweł Wawrzyński

Recent work investigated the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) for the synthesis of heuristic guidance to improve the performance of temporal planners when a domain is fixed and a set of training problems (not plans) is given. The idea is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Irene Brugnara , Alessandro Valentini , Andrea Micheli

To make reinforcement learning more sample efficient, we need better credit assignment methods that measure an action's influence on future rewards. Building upon Hindsight Credit Assignment (HCA), we introduce Counterfactual Contribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Alexander Meulemans , Simon Schug , Seijin Kobayashi , Nathaniel Daw , Gregory Wayne

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) has proven to be a successful framework for leveraging experience from prior tasks to rapidly learn new related tasks, however, current meta-RL approaches struggle to learn in sparse reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-12-03 Charles Packer , Pieter Abbeel , Joseph E. Gonzalez

Designing rewards for Reinforcement Learning (RL) is challenging because it needs to convey the desired task, be efficient to optimize, and be easy to compute. The latter is particularly problematic when applying RL to robotics, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-28 Yiming Ding , Carlos Florensa , Mariano Phielipp , Pieter Abbeel

While large language models excel in diverse domains, their performance on complex longhorizon agentic decision-making tasks remains limited. Most existing methods concentrate on designing effective reward models (RMs) to advance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Zhicong Lu , Zichuan Lin , Wei Jia , Changyuan Tian , Deheng Ye , Peiguang Li , Li Jin , Nayu Liu , Guangluan Xu , Wei Feng

In many environments only a tiny subset of all states yield high reward. In these cases, few of the interactions with the environment provide a relevant learning signal. Hence, we may want to preferentially train on those high-reward states…

Most real-world Multi-Robot Task Allocation (MRTA) problems require fast and efficient decision-making, which is often achieved using heuristics-aided methods such as genetic algorithms, auction-based methods, and bipartite graph matching…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Steve Paul , Nathan Maurer , Souma Chowdhury

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences through reinforcement learning (RLHF) can lead to reward hacking, where LLMs exploit failures in the reward model (RM) to achieve seemingly high rewards without meeting the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-23 Alexandre Ramé , Nino Vieillard , Léonard Hussenot , Robert Dadashi , Geoffrey Cideron , Olivier Bachem , Johan Ferret

This paper proposes a policy-based deep reinforcement learning hyper-heuristic framework for solving the Job Shop Scheduling Problem. The hyper-heuristic agent learns to switch scheduling rules based on the system state dynamically. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Sofiene Lassoued , Asrat Gobachew , Stefan Lier , Andreas Schwung

Randomized experiments (a.k.a. A/B tests) are a powerful tool for estimating treatment effects, to inform decisions making in business, healthcare and other applications. In many problems, the treatment has a lasting effect that evolves…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ziyang Tang , Yiheng Duan , Stephanie Zhang , Lihong Li