Related papers: Reconciling Rewards with Predictive State Represen…

Animals need to devise strategies to maximize returns while interacting with their environment based on incoming noisy sensory observations. Task-relevant states, such as the agent's location within an environment or the presence of a…

A popular approach to solving a decision process with non-Markovian rewards (NMRDP) is to exploit a compact representation of the reward function to automatically translate the NMRDP into an equivalent Markov decision process (MDP) amenable…

Most provably-efficient learning algorithms introduce optimism about poorly-understood states and actions to encourage exploration. We study an alternative approach for efficient exploration, posterior sampling for reinforcement learning…

This paper proposes an observer-based framework for solving Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) when an accurate model is not available. We first propose to use a Moving Horizon Estimation-Model Predictive Control…

We study reinforcement learning with function approximation for large-scale Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) where the state space and observation space are large or even continuous. Particularly, we consider Hilbert…

We present an alternative view for the study of optimal control of partially observed Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs). We first revisit the traditional (and by now standard) separated-design method of reducing the problem to fully…

Reward machines (RMs) are automata structures that encode (non-Markovian) reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL). RMs can reward any behaviour representable in regular languages and, when paired with RL algorithms that exploit RM…

Given a set of items and a set of evaluators who all individually rank them, how do we aggregate these evaluations into a single societal ranking? Work in social choice and statistics has produced many aggregation methods for this problem,…

We study the problem of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), where the learning agent recovers a reward function using expert demonstrations. Most of the existing IRL techniques make the often unrealistic assumption that the agent has…

Partially-Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are a well-known stochastic model for sequential decision making under limited information. We consider the EXPTIME-hard problem of synthesising policies that almost-surely reach some…

This paper delves into the problem of safe reinforcement learning (RL) in a partially observable environment with the aim of achieving safe-reachability objectives. In traditional partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP),…

Evaluating policies using off-policy data is crucial for applying reinforcement learning to real-world problems such as healthcare and autonomous driving. Previous methods for off-policy evaluation (OPE) generally suffer from high variance…

This paper studies the expected value of multiplicative rewards, where rewards obtained in each step are multiplied (instead of the usual addition), in Markov chains (MCs) and Markov decision processes (MDPs). One of the key differences to…

Reinforcement learning methods require careful design involving a reward function to obtain the desired action policy for a given task. In the absence of hand-crafted reward functions, prior work on the topic has proposed several methods…

Recent works have studied *state entropy maximization* in reinforcement learning, in which the agent's objective is to learn a policy inducing high entropy over states visitation (Hazan et al., 2019). They typically assume full…

Ensuring AI models align with human values is essential for their safety and functionality. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) leverages human preferences to achieve this alignment. However, when preferences are sourced from…

Process reward models (PRMs) provide more nuanced supervision compared to outcome reward models (ORMs) for optimizing policy models, positioning them as a promising approach to enhancing the capabilities of LLMs in complex reasoning tasks.…

Human-designed reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL) agents are frequently misaligned with the humans' true, unobservable objectives, and thus act only as proxies. Optimizing for a misspecified proxy reward function often induces…

Reward machines (RMs) provide a structured way to specify non-Markovian rewards in reinforcement learning (RL), thereby improving both expressiveness and programmability. Viewed more broadly, they separate what is known about the…

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach for learning control policies directly from high-dimensional state and observation. However, it tends to be data-inefficient, which is especially costly in robotic learning…