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Related papers: Hierarchies of Reward Machines

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Reward Machines (RMs) are an established mechanism in Reinforcement Learning (RL) to represent and learn sparse, temporally extended tasks with non-Markovian rewards. RMs rely on high-level information in the form of labels that are emitted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Thomas Krug , Daniel Neider

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods usually treat reward functions as black boxes. As such, these methods must extensively interact with the environment in order to discover rewards and optimal policies. In most RL applications, however,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Toryn Q. Klassen , Richard Valenzano , Sheila A. McIlraith

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, a collection of agents learns to interact in a shared environment to achieve a common goal. We propose the use of reward machines (RM) -- Mealy machines used as structured representations…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Cyrus Neary , Zhe Xu , Bo Wu , Ufuk Topcu

Reward machines (RMs) inform reinforcement learning agents about the reward structure of the environment. This is particularly advantageous for complex non-Markovian tasks because agents with access to RMs can learn more efficiently from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Kristina Levina , Nikolaos Pappas , Athanasios Karapantelakis , Aneta Vulgarakis Feljan , Jendrik Seipp

In this paper, we study the cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) problems using Reward Machines (RMs) to specify the reward functions such that the prior knowledge of high-level events in a task can be leveraged to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Xuejing Zheng , Chao Yu

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are highly sensitive to reward function specification, which remains a central challenge limiting their broad applicability. We present ARM-FM: Automated Reward Machines via Foundation Models, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Roger Creus Castanyer , Faisal Mohamed , Pablo Samuel Castro , Cyrus Neary , Glen Berseth

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Daniel Ajeleye , Ashutosh Trivedi , Majid Zamani

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Giovanni Varricchione , Toryn Q. Klassen , Natasha Alechina , Mehdi Dastani , Brian Logan , Sheila A. McIlraith

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central problem in artificial intelligence. This problem consists of defining artificial agents that can learn optimal behaviour by interacting with an environment -- where the optimal behaviour is defined…

This paper presents a novel approach to Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) that combines cooperative task decomposition with the learning of reward machines (RMs) encoding the structure of the sub-tasks. The proposed method helps…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Leo Ardon , Daniel Furelos-Blanco , Alessandra Russo

Learning from Demonstrations (LfD) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) have enabled robot agents to accomplish complex tasks. Reward Machines (RMs) enhance RL's capability to train policies over extended time horizons by structuring high-level…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Mattijs Baert , Sam Leroux , Pieter Simoens

Reward models (RMs) play a critical role in enhancing the reasoning performance of LLMs. For example, they can provide training signals to finetune LLMs during reinforcement learning (RL) and help select the best answer from multiple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Qiyuan Liu , Hao Xu , Xuhong Chen , Wei Chen , Yee Whye Teh , Ning Miao

Reward machines (RMs) are an effective approach for addressing non-Markovian rewards in reinforcement learning (RL) through finite-state machines. Traditional RMs, which label edges with propositional logic formulae, inherit the limited…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Leo Ardon , Daniel Furelos-Blanco , Roko Parac , Alessandra Russo

Reward models (RMs) have become essential for aligning large language models (LLMs), serving as scalable proxies for human evaluation in both training and inference. However, existing RMs struggle on knowledge-intensive and long-form tasks,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Ziyou Hu , Zhengliang Shi , Minghang Zhu , Haitao Li , Teng Sun , Pengjie Ren , Suzan Verberne , Zhaochun Ren

Reward specification plays a central role in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding the agent's behavior. To express non-Markovian rewards, formalisms such as reward machines have been introduced to capture dependencies on histories. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Rajarshi Roy , Anirban Majumdar , Ritam Raha , David Parker , Marta Kwiatkowska

Recent studies show that deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents tend to overfit to the task on which they were trained and fail to adapt to minor environment changes. To expedite learning when transferring to unseen tasks, we propose a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Guy Azran , Mohamad H. Danesh , Stefano V. Albrecht , Sarah Keren

Reward models play a critical role in guiding large language models toward outputs that align with human expectations. However, an open challenge remains in effectively utilizing test-time compute to enhance reward model performance. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Jiaxin Guo , Zewen Chi , Li Dong , Qingxiu Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Furu Wei

Reward machines are an established tool for dealing with reinforcement learning problems in which rewards are sparse and depend on complex sequences of actions. However, existing algorithms for learning reward machines assume an overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jan Corazza , Ivan Gavran , Daniel Neider

Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Cevahir Koprulu , Ufuk Topcu

In this work, we propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) structure which is capable of performing autonomous vehicle planning tasks in simulated environments with multiple sub-goals. In this hierarchical structure, the network…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Zhiqian Qiao , Zachariah Tyree , Priyantha Mudalige , Jeff Schneider , John M. Dolan
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