Related papers: Taylor Expansion of Discount Factors
Specifying a Reinforcement Learning (RL) task involves choosing a suitable planning horizon, which is typically modeled by a discount factor. It is known that applying RL algorithms with a lower discount factor can act as a regularizer,…
The optimal objective is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how policies are evaluated and optimized. While total return maximization is the ideal objective in RL, discounted return maximization is the…
Distributional reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework increasingly adopted in safety-critical domains for its ability to optimize risk-sensitive objectives. However, the role of the discount factor is often overlooked, as it is…
In many finite horizon episodic reinforcement learning (RL) settings, it is desirable to optimize for the undiscounted return - in settings like Atari, for instance, the goal is to collect the most points while staying alive in the long…
As the operations of autonomous systems generally affect simultaneously several users, it is crucial that their designs account for fairness considerations. In contrast to standard (deep) reinforcement learning (RL), we investigate the…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents have traditionally been tasked with maximizing the value function of a Markov decision process (MDP), either in continuous settings, with fixed discount factor $\gamma < 1$, or in episodic settings, with…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…
In reinforcement learning (RL), the goal is to obtain an optimal policy, for which the optimality criterion is fundamentally important. Two major optimality criteria are average and discounted rewards. While the latter is more popular, it…
In deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), value functions are typically approximated using deep neural networks and trained via mean squared error regression objectives to fit the true value functions. Recent research has proposed an alternative…
Reinforcement learning (RL) typically defines a discount factor as part of the Markov Decision Process. The discount factor values future rewards by an exponential scheme that leads to theoretical convergence guarantees of the Bellman…
Commonly in reinforcement learning (RL), rewards are discounted over time using an exponential function to model time preference, thereby bounding the expected long-term reward. In contrast, in economics and psychology, it has been shown…
The difficulty of manually specifying reward functions has led to an interest in using linear temporal logic (LTL) to express objectives for reinforcement learning (RL). However, LTL has the downside that it is sensitive to small…
The endeavor of artificial intelligence (AI) is to design autonomous agents capable of achieving complex tasks. Namely, reinforcement learning (RL) proposes a theoretical background to learn optimal behaviors. In practice, RL algorithms…
Temporal difference methods enable efficient estimation of value functions in reinforcement learning in an incremental fashion, and are of broader interest because they correspond learning as observed in biological systems. Standard value…
In this work, we study an inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem where the experts are planning under a shared reward function but with different, unknown planning horizons. Without the knowledge of discount factors, the reward…
Using deep neural nets as function approximator for reinforcement learning tasks have recently been shown to be very powerful for solving problems approaching real-world complexity. Using these results as a benchmark, we discuss the role…
Temporal difference (TD) learning is an important approach in reinforcement learning, as it combines ideas from dynamic programming and Monte Carlo methods in a way that allows for online and incremental model-free learning. A key idea of…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables effective learning from previously collected data without exploration, which shows great promise in real-world applications when exploration is expensive or even infeasible. The discount factor,…
In complex tasks where the reward function is not straightforward and consists of a set of objectives, multiple reinforcement learning (RL) policies that perform task adequately, but employ different strategies can be trained by adjusting…
Solving a reinforcement learning (RL) problem poses two competing challenges: fitting a potentially discontinuous value function, and generalizing well to new observations. In this paper, we analyze the learning dynamics of temporal…