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Related papers: Exploration and Incentives in Reinforcement Learni…

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We consider Incentive Decision Processes, where a principal seeks to reduce its costs due to another agent's behavior, by offering incentives to the agent for alternate behavior. We focus on the case where a principal interacts with a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-10-19 Sashank J. Reddi , Emma Brunskill

Most exploration research on reinforcement learning (RL) has paid attention to `the way of exploration', which is `how to explore'. The other exploration research, `when to explore', has not been the main focus of RL exploration research.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-07 JaeYoon Kim , Junyu Xuan , Christy Liang , Farookh Hussain

In reinforcement learning, an agent interacts sequentially with an environment to maximize a reward, receiving only partial, probabilistic feedback. This creates a fundamental exploration-exploitation trade-off: the agent must explore to…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-27 Josep Lumbreras , Ruo Cheng Huang , Yanglin Hu , Marco Fanizza , Mile Gu

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Viraj Mehta , Ian Char , Joseph Abbate , Rory Conlin , Mark D. Boyer , Stefano Ermon , Jeff Schneider , Willie Neiswanger

In the on-line Explore and Exploit literature, central to Machine Learning, a central planner is faced with a set of alternatives, each yielding some unknown reward. The planner's goal is to learn the optimal alternative as soon as…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-07-31 Gal Bahar , Rann Smorodinsky , Moshe Tennenholtz

While exploration in single-agent reinforcement learning has been studied extensively in recent years, considerably less work has focused on its counterpart in multi-agent reinforcement learning. To address this issue, this work proposes a…

In reinforcement learning, we typically refer to unsupervised pre-training when we aim to pre-train a policy without a priori access to the task specification, i.e. rewards, to be later employed for efficient learning of downstream tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Riccardo Zamboni , Mirco Mutti , Marcello Restelli

Reinforcement Learning is a powerful tool to model decision-making processes. However, it relies on an exploration-exploitation trade-off that remains an open challenge for many tasks. In this work, we study neighboring state-based,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Yu-Teng Li , Justin Lin , Jeffery Cheng , Pedro Pachuca

Some researchers speculate that intelligent reinforcement learning (RL) agents would be incentivized to seek resources and power in pursuit of their objectives. Other researchers point out that RL agents need not have human-like…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Alexander Matt Turner , Logan Smith , Rohin Shah , Andrew Critch , Prasad Tadepalli

Safe exploration is crucial for the real-world application of reinforcement learning (RL). Previous works consider the safe exploration problem as Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP), where the policies are being optimized under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-12 Hao Sun , Ziping Xu , Meng Fang , Zhenghao Peng , Jiadong Guo , Bo Dai , Bolei Zhou

We consider the problem of learning by demonstration from agents acting in unknown stochastic Markov environments or games. Our aim is to estimate agent preferences in order to construct improved policies for the same task that the agents…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-08-12 Aristide Tossou , Christos Dimitrakakis

We consider the problem of learning by demonstration from agents acting in unknown stochastic Markov environments or games. Our aim is to estimate agent preferences in order to construct improved policies for the same task that the agents…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-07-16 Aristide C. Y. Tossou , Christos Dimitrakakis

We address the problem of reinforcement learning in which observations may exhibit an arbitrary form of stochastic dependence on past observations and actions, i.e. environments more general than (PO)MDPs. The task for an agent is to attain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2009-12-30 Daniil Ryabko , Marcus Hutter

Intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning aims to address the exploration challenge for sparse-reward tasks. However, the study of exploration methods in transition-dependent multi-agent settings is largely absent from the literature.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-30 Tonghan Wang , Jianhao Wang , Yi Wu , Chongjie Zhang

Reinforcement learning is commonly concerned with problems of maximizing accumulated rewards in Markov decision processes. Oftentimes, a certain goal state or a subset of the state space attain maximal reward. In such a case, the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Pavel Osinenko , Grigory Yaremenko , Georgiy Malaniya , Anton Bolychev , Alexander Gepperth

The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-25 Wuxia Chen , Taposh Banerjee , Jemin George , Carl Busart

A reinforcement learning agent tries to maximize its cumulative payoff by interacting in an unknown environment. It is important for the agent to explore suboptimal actions as well as to pick actions with highest known rewards. Yet, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-23 Reazul Hasan Russel

One of the challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL) is that the agent needs to trade off the exploration of the environment and the exploitation of the samples to optimize its behavior. Whether we optimize for regret, sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Jean Tarbouriech , Matteo Pirotta , Michal Valko , Alessandro Lazaric

General purpose intelligent learning agents cycle through (complex,non-MDP) sequences of observations, actions, and rewards. On the other hand, reinforcement learning is well-developed for small finite state Markov Decision Processes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2009-12-30 Marcus Hutter

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…