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Long-term temporal credit assignment is an important challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). It refers to the ability of the agent to attribute actions to consequences that may occur after a long time interval. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Tanmay Gangwani , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng

Reinforcement Learning has suffered from poor reward specification, and issues for reward hacking even in simple enough domains. Preference Based Reinforcement Learning attempts to solve the issue by utilizing binary feedbacks on queried…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-20 Mudit Verma , Subbarao Kambhampati

Cooperative behavior is prevalent in both human society and nature. Understanding the emergence and maintenance of cooperation among self-interested individuals remains a significant challenge in evolutionary biology and social sciences.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Lanyu Yang , Dongchun Jiang , Fuqiang Guo , Mingjian Fu

Deep reinforcement learning has been shown to be a powerful framework for learning policies from complex high-dimensional sensory inputs to actions in complex tasks, such as the Atari domain. In this paper, we explore output representation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-16 Ishan P. Durugkar , Clemens Rosenbaum , Stefan Dernbach , Sridhar Mahadevan

In multi-agent environments, agents often struggle to learn optimal policies due to sparse or delayed global rewards, particularly in long-horizon tasks where it is challenging to evaluate actions at intermediate time steps. We introduce…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-12-20 Aditya Kapoor , Sushant Swamy , Kale-ab Tessera , Mayank Baranwal , Mingfei Sun , Harshad Khadilkar , Stefano V. Albrecht

Problems which require both long-horizon planning and continuous control capabilities pose significant challenges to existing reinforcement learning agents. In this paper we introduce a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning agent which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Jan Achterhold , Markus Krimmel , Joerg Stueckler

While many multi-armed bandit algorithms assume that rewards for all arms are constant across rounds, this assumption does not hold in many real-world scenarios. This paper considers the setting of recovering bandits (Pike-Burke &…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Yuto Tanimoto , Kenji Fukumizu

Temporal-Difference (TD) learning is a general and very useful tool for estimating the value function of a given policy, which in turn is required to find good policies. Generally speaking, TD learning updates states whenever they are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Nishanth Anand , Doina Precup

Latent prediction--where agents learn by predicting their own latents--has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training general representations in machine learning. In reinforcement learning (RL), this approach has been explored to define…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Marco Bagatella , Matteo Pirotta , Ahmed Touati , Alessandro Lazaric , Andrea Tirinzoni

Reinforcement learning (RL) can be formulated as a sequence modeling problem, where models predict future actions based on historical state-action-reward sequences. Current approaches typically require long trajectory sequences to model the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Hemant Kumawat , Saibal Mukhopadhyay

Learning long-term dependencies in extended temporal sequences requires credit assignment to events far back in the past. The most common method for training recurrent neural networks, back-propagation through time (BPTT), requires credit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-12 Nan Rosemary Ke , Anirudh Goyal , Olexa Bilaniuk , Jonathan Binas , Michael C. Mozer , Chris Pal , Yoshua Bengio

We present a temporally extended variation of the successor representation, which we term t-SR. t-SR captures the expected state transition dynamics of temporally extended actions by constructing successor representations over primitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Matthew J. Sargent , Peter J. Bentley , Caswell Barry , William de Cothi

Humans spend a remarkable fraction of waking life engaged in acts of "mental time travel". We dwell on our actions in the past and experience satisfaction or regret. More than merely autobiographical storytelling, we use these event…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-12-24 Chia-Chun Hung , Timothy Lillicrap , Josh Abramson , Yan Wu , Mehdi Mirza , Federico Carnevale , Arun Ahuja , Greg Wayne

Estimating value functions is a core component of reinforcement learning algorithms. Temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms use bootstrapping, i.e. they update the value function toward a learning target using value estimates at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-07 Anthony GX-Chen , Veronica Chelu , Blake A. Richards , Joelle Pineau

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents that exist in high-dimensional state spaces, such as those composed of images, have interconnected learning burdens. Agents must learn an action-selection policy that completes their given task, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-12 Trevor McInroe , Lukas Schäfer , Stefano V. Albrecht

The recency heuristic in reinforcement learning is the assumption that stimuli that occurred closer in time to an acquired reward should be more heavily reinforced. The recency heuristic is one of the key assumptions made by TD($\lambda$),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Brett Daley , Marlos C. Machado , Martha White

Agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) shows promise for complex tasks, but Text-to-SQL remains mostly restricted to single-turn paradigms. A primary bottleneck is the credit assignment problem. In traditional paradigms, rewards are determined…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Long Li , Zhijian Zhou , Jiangxuan Long , Peiyang Liu , Weidi Xu , Zhe Wang , Shirui Pan , Chao Qu

TD($\lambda$) with function approximation has proved empirically successful for some complex reinforcement learning problems. For linear approximation, TD($\lambda$) has been shown to minimise the squared error between the approximate value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Lex Weaver , Jonathan Baxter

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has the potential to be used for synthesizing feedback controllers (agents) for various complex systems with unknown dynamics. These systems are expected to satisfy diverse safety and liveness properties…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-12-05 Nikhil Kumar Singh , Indranil Saha

Deep reinforcement learning has obtained significant breakthroughs in recent years. Most methods in deep-RL achieve good results via the maximization of the reward signal provided by the environment, typically in the form of discounted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-10 Yubin Deng , Ke Yu , Dahua Lin , Xiaoou Tang , Chen Change Loy