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Related papers: Admissible Policy Teaching through Reward Design

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Strategic learning studies how decision rules interact with agents who may strategically change their inputs/features to achieve better outcomes. In standard settings, models assume that the decision-maker's sole scope is to learn a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Valia Efthymiou , Ekaterina Fedorova , Chara Podimata

In typical reinforcement learning (RL), the environment is assumed given and the goal of the learning is to identify an optimal policy for the agent taking actions through its interactions with the environment. In this paper, we extend this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-10-25 Haifeng Zhang , Jun Wang , Zhiming Zhou , Weinan Zhang , Ying Wen , Yong Yu , Wenxin Li

Advances in reinforcement learning research have demonstrated the ways in which different agent-based models can learn how to optimally perform a task within a given environment. Reinforcement leaning solves unsupervised problems where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-03 Herkulaas Combrink , Vukosi Marivate , Benjamin Rosman

Reinforcement learning agents learn from rewards, but humans can uniquely assign value to novel, abstract outcomes in a goal-dependent manner. However, this flexibility is cognitively costly, making learning less efficient. Here, we propose…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-09-11 Gaia Molinaro , Anne G. E. Collins

Solving a reinforcement learning problem typically involves correctly prespecifying the reward signal from which the algorithm learns. Here, we approach the problem of reward signal design by using an evolutionary approach to perform a…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-05-19 Rafal Muszynski , Katja Hofmann , Jun Wang

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Tsung-Yen Yang , Justinian Rosca , Karthik Narasimhan , Peter J. Ramadge

We enable reinforcement learning agents to learn successful behavior policies by utilizing relevant pre-existing teacher policies. The teacher policies are introduced as objectives, in addition to the task objective, in a multi-objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Shruti Mishra , Ankit Anand , Jordan Hoffmann , Nicolas Heess , Martin Riedmiller , Abbas Abdolmaleki , Doina Precup

The increasing adoption of Reinforcement Learning in safety-critical systems domains such as autonomous vehicles, health, and aviation raises the need for ensuring their safety. Existing safety mechanisms such as adversarial training,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Paulina Stevia Nouwou Mindom , Amin Nikanjam , Foutse Khomh , John Mullins

We characterize the optimal reward functions (scoring rules) that incentivize an agent to acquire information and report it truthfully to the principal. The optimal scoring rules let the agent make a simple binary bet in single-dimensional…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jason D. Hartline , Yingkai Li , Liren Shan , Yifan Wu

We identify two issues with the family of algorithms based on the Adversarial Imitation Learning framework. The first problem is implicit bias present in the reward functions used in these algorithms. While these biases might work well for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-16 Ilya Kostrikov , Kumar Krishna Agrawal , Debidatta Dwibedi , Sergey Levine , Jonathan Tompson

We consider the challenge of finding a deterministic policy for a Markov decision process that uniformly (in all states) maximizes one reward subject to a probabilistic constraint over a different reward. Existing solutions do not fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-21 Jaeyoung Lee , Sean Sedwards , Krzysztof Czarnecki

Adversarial training aims to defend against adversaries: malicious opponents whose sole aim is to harm predictive performance in any way possible. This presents a rather harsh perspective, which we assert results in unnecessarily…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Maayan Ehrenberg , Roy Ganz , Nir Rosenfeld

Obtaining a survival strategy (policy) is one of the fundamental problems of biological agents. In this paper, we generalize the formulation of previous research related to the survival of an agent and we formulate the survival problem as a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-07-26 Naoto Yoshida

We study reward poisoning attacks in reinforcement learning (RL), where an adversary manipulates rewards within constrained budgets to force the target RL agent to adopt a policy that aligns with the attacker's objectives. Prior works on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Jose Efraim Aguilar Escamilla , Haoyang Hong , Jiawei Li , Haoyu Zhao , Xuezhou Zhang , Sanghyun Hong , Huazheng Wang

Interactive reinforcement learning has become an important apprenticeship approach to speed up convergence in classic reinforcement learning problems. In this regard, a variant of interactive reinforcement learning is policy shaping which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-04-16 Francisco Cruz , Sven Magg , Yukie Nagai , Stefan Wermter

We propose a reinforcement learning based approach to query object localization, for which an agent is trained to localize objects of interest specified by a small exemplary set. We learn a transferable reward signal formulated using the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Tingfeng Li , Shaobo Han , Martin Renqiang Min , Dimitris N. Metaxas

In this work, we provide theoretical guarantees for reward decomposition in deterministic MDPs. Reward decomposition is a special case of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, that allows one to learn many policies in parallel and combine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-14 Tom Zahavy , Avinatan Hasidim , Haim Kaplan , Yishay Mansour

We study the problem of learning exploration-exploitation strategies that effectively adapt to dynamic environments, where the task may change over time. While RNN-based policies could in principle represent such strategies, in practice…

In this work we introduce reinforcement learning techniques for solving lexicographic multi-objective problems. These are problems that involve multiple reward signals, and where the goal is to learn a policy that maximises the first reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Joar Skalse , Lewis Hammond , Charlie Griffin , Alessandro Abate

Imitation learning seeks to learn an expert policy from sampled demonstrations. However, in the real world, it is often difficult to find a perfect expert and avoiding dangerous behaviors becomes relevant for safety reasons. We present the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-26 David Venuto , Leonard Boussioux , Junhao Wang , Rola Dali , Jhelum Chakravorty , Yoshua Bengio , Doina Precup