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Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-10 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Jacob Adamczyk , Volodymyr Makarenko , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

Reinforcement learning agents can achieve super-human performance in complex decision-making tasks, but their behaviour is often difficult to understand and explain. This lack of explanation limits deployment, especially in safety-critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Daniel Beechey , Thomas M. S. Smith , Özgür Şimşek

In multi-agent reinforcement learning systems, the actions of one agent can have a negative impact on the rewards of other agents. One way to combat this problem is to let agents trade their rewards amongst each other. Motivated by this,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-07-25 Michael Kölle , Lennart Rietdorf , Kyrill Schmid

Single-task RL agents are typically trained under a fixed reward function, which limits their robustness to reward misspecification and their ability to adapt to changing preferences. We introduce Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan , Pieter Abbeel

Exploration in multi-agent reinforcement learning is a challenging problem, especially in environments with sparse rewards. We propose a general method for efficient exploration by sharing experience amongst agents. Our proposed algorithm,…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-05-20 Filippos Christianos , Lukas Schäfer , Stefano V. Albrecht

This paper introduces two learning schemes for distributed agents in Reinforcement Learning (RL) environments, namely Reward-Weighted (R-Weighted) and Loss-Weighted (L-Weighted) gradient merger. The R/L weighted methods replace standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Martin Holen , Per-Arne Andersen , Kristian Muri Knausgård , Morten Goodwin

Designing reward functions for continuous-control robotics often leads to subtle misalignments or reward hacking, especially in complex tasks. Preference-based RL mitigates some of these pitfalls by learning rewards from comparative…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Anukriti Singh , Amisha Bhaskar , Peihong Yu , Souradip Chakraborty , Ruthwik Dasyam , Amrit Bedi , Pratap Tokekar

Reward function design and exploration time are arguably the biggest obstacles to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real world. In many real-world tasks, designing a reward function takes considerable hand…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-06-14 Pierre Sermanet , Kelvin Xu , Sergey Levine

We study policy evaluation problems in multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) under a low-rank representation setting. In this setting, we are given $N$ learning tasks where the corresponding value function of these tasks lie in an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Yitao Bai , Sihan Zeng , Justin Romberg , Thinh T. Doan

A challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning is to be able to generalize over intractable state-action spaces. Inspired from Tesseract [Mahajan et al., 2021], this position paper investigates generalisation in state-action space over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Pascal Van Der Vaart , Anuj Mahajan , Shimon Whiteson

Multi-agent reinforcement learning involves multiple agents interacting with each other and a shared environment to complete tasks. When rewards provided by the environment are sparse, agents may not receive immediate feedback on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-31 Baicen Xiao , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Radha Poovendran

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been widely applied to many control tasks and substantially improved the performances compared to conventional control methods in many domains where the reward function is well defined. However, for many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-22 Baohe Zhang , Yuan Zhang , Lilli Frison , Thomas Brox , Joschka Bödecker

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a machine learning approach that trains agents to maximize cumulative rewards through interactions with environments. The integration of RL with deep learning has recently resulted in impressive achievements…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Hui Bai , Ran Cheng , Yaochu Jin

Reward learning enables robots to learn adaptable behaviors from human input. Traditional methods model the reward as a linear function of hand-crafted features, but that requires specifying all the relevant features a priori, which is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Andreea Bobu , Marius Wiggert , Claire Tomlin , Anca D. Dragan

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have emerged as a popular choice for training an efficient and effective dialogue policy. However, these methods suffer from sparse and unstable reward signals returned by a user simulator only when a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-18 Ziming Li , Sungjin Lee , Baolin Peng , Jinchao Li , Julia Kiseleva , Maarten de Rijke , Shahin Shayandeh , Jianfeng Gao

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective approach to motion planning in autonomous driving, where an optimal driving policy can be automatically learned using the interaction data with the environment. Nevertheless, the reward function…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Lin-Chi Wu , Zengjie Zhang , Sofie Haesaert , Zhiqiang Ma , Zhiyong Sun

Explainable AI techniques that describe agent reward functions can enhance human-robot collaboration in a variety of settings. One context where human understanding of agent reward functions is particularly beneficial is in the value…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-10-11 Lindsay Sanneman , Julie Shah

We present an approach for reconfiguration of dynamic visual sensor networks with deep reinforcement learning (RL). Our RL agent uses a modified asynchronous advantage actor-critic framework and the recently proposed Relational Network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-14 Paul Jasek , Bernard Abayowa

One obstacle to applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems is the lack of suitable reward functions. Designing such reward functions is difficult in part because the user only has an implicit understanding of the task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Jan Leike , David Krueger , Tom Everitt , Miljan Martic , Vishal Maini , Shane Legg