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Standard RL algorithms assume fixed environment dynamics and require a significant amount of interaction to adapt to new environments. We introduce Policy-Dynamics Value Functions (PD-VF), a novel approach for rapidly adapting to dynamics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-07 Roberta Raileanu , Max Goldstein , Arthur Szlam , Rob Fergus

Constructing general knowledge by learning task-independent models of the world can help agents solve challenging problems. However, both constructing and evaluating such models remains an open challenge. The most common approaches to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-04-15 Alex Kearney , Anna Koop , Patrick M. Pilarski

The ability of a reinforcement learning (RL) agent to learn about many reward functions at the same time has many potential benefits, such as the decomposition of complex tasks into simpler ones, the exchange of information between tasks,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-20 Diana Borsa , André Barreto , John Quan , Daniel Mankowitz , Rémi Munos , Hado van Hasselt , David Silver , Tom Schaul

In reinforcement learning, we often define goals by specifying rewards within desirable states. One problem with this approach is that we typically need to redefine the rewards each time the goal changes, which often requires some…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-07-26 Ashley D. Edwards , Srijan Sood , Charles L. Isbell

Are world models a necessary ingredient for flexible, goal-directed behaviour, or is model-free learning sufficient? We provide a formal answer to this question, showing that any agent capable of generalizing to multi-step goal-directed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Jonathan Richens , David Abel , Alexis Bellot , Tom Everitt

In this paper, we propose a novel model-based multi-agent reinforcement learning approach named Value Decomposition Framework with Disentangled World Model to address the challenge of achieving a common goal of multiple agents interacting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Zhizun Wang , David Meger

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

Transfer in Reinforcement Learning (RL) refers to the idea of applying knowledge gained from previous tasks to solving related tasks. Learning a universal value function (Schaul et al., 2015), which generalizes over goals and states, has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-14 Chen Ma , Dylan R. Ashley , Junfeng Wen , Yoshua Bengio

Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique to train an agent to perform a task. However, an agent that is trained using reinforcement learning is only capable of achieving the single task that is specified via its reward function. Such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-24 Carlos Florensa , David Held , Xinyang Geng , Pieter Abbeel

There have been key advancements to building universal approximators for multi-goal collections of reinforcement learning value functions -- key elements in estimating long-term returns of states in a parameterized manner. We extend this to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Rushiv Arora

Autonomous agents need large repertoires of skills to act reasonably on new tasks that they have not seen before. However, acquiring these skills using only a stream of high-dimensional, unstructured, and unlabeled observations is a tricky…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Andrii Zadaianchuk , Maximilian Seitzer , Georg Martius

Deep Reinforcement Learning has shown significant progress in extracting useful representations from high-dimensional inputs albeit using hand-crafted auxiliary tasks and pseudo rewards. Automatically learning such representations in an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Somjit Nath , Gopeshh Raaj Subbaraj , Khimya Khetarpal , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

To learn directed behaviors in complex environments, intelligent agents need to optimize objective functions. Various objectives are known for designing artificial agents, including task rewards and intrinsic motivation. However, it is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Danijar Hafner , Pedro A. Ortega , Jimmy Ba , Thomas Parr , Karl Friston , Nicolas Heess

Reward functions are central in specifying the task we want a reinforcement learning agent to perform. Given a task and desired optimal behavior, we study the problem of designing informative reward functions so that the designed rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Rati Devidze , Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Adish Singla

The interpretation of spatial references is highly contextual, requiring joint inference over both language and the environment. We consider the task of spatial reasoning in a simulated environment, where an agent can act and receive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-11-15 Michael Janner , Karthik Narasimhan , Regina Barzilay

In some agent designs like inverse reinforcement learning an agent needs to learn its own reward function. Learning the reward function and optimising for it are typically two different processes, usually performed at different stages. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-04-29 Stuart Armstrong , Jan Leike , Laurent Orseau , Shane Legg

The concept of the value-gradient is introduced and developed in the context of reinforcement learning. It is shown that by learning the value-gradients exploration or stochastic behaviour is no longer needed to find locally optimal…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2008-03-26 Michael Fairbank

A long-standing challenge in Reinforcement Learning is enabling agents to learn a model of their environment which can be transferred to solve other problems in a world with the same underlying rules. One reason this is difficult is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-16 Kai Olav Ellefsen , Jim Torresen

In many real-world applications, reinforcement learning (RL) agents might have to solve multiple tasks, each one typically modeled via a reward function. If reward functions are expressed linearly, and the agent has previously learned a set…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Lucas N. Alegre , Ana L. C. Bazzan , Bruno C. da Silva

In computational reinforcement learning, a growing body of work seeks to express an agent's model of the world through predictions about future sensations. In this manuscript we focus on predictions expressed as General Value Functions:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Alex Kearney , Anna Koop , Johannes Günther , Patrick M. Pilarski