Related papers: Examining average and discounted reward optimality…
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…
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…
This paper bridges some of the gap between optimal planning and reinforcement learning (RL), both of which share roots in dynamic programming applied to sequential decision making or optimal control. Whereas planning typically favors…
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…
To date, distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) methods have exclusively focused on the discounted setting, where an agent aims to optimize a discounted sum of rewards over time. In this work, we extend distributional RL…
Most of reinforcement learning algorithms optimize the discounted criterion which is beneficial to accelerate the convergence and reduce the variance of estimates. Although the discounted criterion is appropriate for certain tasks such as…
Although in recent years reinforcement learning has become very popular the number of successful applications to different kinds of operations research problems is rather scarce. Reinforcement learning is based on the well-studied dynamic…
In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves 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…
In reinforcement learning, two objective functions have been developed extensively in the literature: discounted and averaged rewards. The generalization to an entropy-regularized setting has led to improved robustness and exploration for…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) serves as a versatile framework for sequential decision-making, finding applications across diverse domains such as robotics, autonomous driving, recommendation systems, supply chain optimization, biology,…
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…
Discounted reinforcement learning is fundamentally incompatible with function approximation for control in continuing tasks. It is not an optimization problem in its usual formulation, so when using function approximation there is no…
Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have renewed interest in reward design for shaping agent behavior, but manually crafting reward functions is tedious and error-prone. A principled alternative is to specify behavioral…
There has been significant progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) in recent years. Nevertheless, finding suitable hyperparameter configurations and reward functions remains challenging even for experts, and performance heavily relies…
Reinforcement learning is important part of artificial intelligence. In this paper, we review model-free reinforcement learning that utilizes the average reward optimality criterion in the infinite horizon setting. Motivated by the solo…
We show that discounted methods for solving continuing reinforcement learning problems can perform significantly better if they center their rewards by subtracting out the rewards' empirical average. The improvement is substantial at…
This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…
This paper explores multiple optimization methods to improve the performance of rating-based reinforcement learning (RbRL). RbRL, a method based on the idea of human ratings, has been developed to infer reward functions in reward-free…
The average-reward formulation of reinforcement learning (RL) has drawn increased interest in recent years for its ability to solve temporally-extended problems without relying on discounting. Meanwhile, in the discounted setting,…