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Time-inconsistent preferences, where agents favor smaller-sooner over larger-later rewards, are a key feature of human and animal decision-making. Quasi-Hyperbolic (QH) discounting provides a simple yet powerful model for this behavior, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 S. R. Eshwar

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Abhishek Naik , Yi Wan , Manan Tomar , Richard S. Sutton

In human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning or environments where calculating a reward is expensive, the costly rewards can make learning efficiency challenging to achieve. The cost of obtaining feedback from humans or calculating expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Muhammed Yusuf Satici , David L. Roberts

This paper studies reinforcement learning (RL) in doubly inhomogeneous environments under temporal non-stationarity and subject heterogeneity. In a number of applications, it is commonplace to encounter datasets generated by system dynamics…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-18 Liyuan Hu , Mengbing Li , Chengchun Shi , Zhenke Wu , Piotr Fryzlewicz

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for decision processes with non-Markovian reward, in which high-level knowledge of the task in the form of reward machines is available to the learner. We consider probabilistic reward machines with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Hippolyte Bourel , Anders Jonsson , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Chenxiao Ma , Mohammad Sadegh Talebi

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents continually interact with the environment and use the feedback to refine their behavior. To guide policy optimization, reward models are introduced as proxies of the desired objectives, such that when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Rui Yu , Shenghua Wan , Yucen Wang , Chen-Xiao Gao , Le Gan , Zongzhang Zhang , De-Chuan Zhan

The problem of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in an unknown nonlinear dynamical system is equivalent to the search for an optimal feedback law utilizing the simulations/ rollouts of the dynamical system. Most RL techniques search over a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-25 Ran Wang , Karthikeya S. Parunandi , Aayushman Sharma , Raman Goyal , Suman Chakravorty

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a popular paradigm for aligning models with human intent. Typically RLHF algorithms operate in two phases: first, use human preferences to learn a reward function and second,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Joey Hejna , Rafael Rafailov , Harshit Sikchi , Chelsea Finn , Scott Niekum , W. Bradley Knox , Dorsa Sadigh

We study the problem of learning safe control policies that are also effective; i.e., maximizing the probability of satisfying a linear temporal logic (LTL) specification of a task, and the discounted reward capturing the (classic) control…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Alper Kamil Bozkurt , Yu Wang , Miroslav Pajic

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically deal with maximizing the expected cumulative return (discounted or undiscounted, finite or infinite horizon). However, several crucial applications in the real world, such as drug discovery,…

Reinforcement Learning has suffered from poor reward specification, and issues for reward hacking even in simple enough domains. Preference Based Reinforcement Learning attempts to solve the issue by utilizing binary feedbacks on queried…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-20 Mudit Verma , Subbarao Kambhampati

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become a key factor in aligning model behavior with users' goals. However, while humans integrate multiple strategies when making decisions, current RLHF approaches often simplify this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Evelyn Rose , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

Learning optimal feedback control laws capable of executing optimal trajectories is essential for many robotic applications. Such policies can be learned using reinforcement learning or planned using optimal control. While reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-14 Michael Lutter , Boris Belousov , Kim Listmann , Debora Clever , Jan Peters

We study the problem of optimal portfolio selection under stochastic volatility within a continuous time reinforcement learning framework with portfolio constraints. Exploration is modeled through entropy-regularized relaxed controls, where…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2026-04-27 Thai Nguyen , Pertiny Nkuize

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) is an approach that enables RL agents to learn from preference, which is particularly useful when formulating a reward function is challenging. Existing PbRL methods generally involve a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Gaon An , Junhyeok Lee , Xingdong Zuo , Norio Kosaka , Kyung-Min Kim , Hyun Oh Song

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Vitchyr H. Pong , Rowan McAllister , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

In this paper, we study an inverse reinforcement learning problem that involves learning the reward function of a learning agent using trajectory data collected while this agent is learning its optimal policy. To address this problem, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Kavinayan P. Sivakumar , Yi Shen , Zachary Bell , Scott Nivison , Boyuan Chen , Michael M. Zavlanos

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-08-19 Umer Siddique , Paul Weng , Matthieu Zimmer

Large reasoning models (LRMs) often consume excessive tokens, inflating computational cost and latency. More broadly, in goal reaching sequential decision problems we often want to reach the goal quickly, and LRM reasoning can be viewed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Alex Ayoub , Kavosh Asadi , Dale Schuurmans , Csaba Szepesvári , Karim Bouyarmane

Reinforcement learning (RL) depends critically on the choice of reward functions used to capture the de- sired behavior and constraints of a robot. Usually, these are handcrafted by a expert designer and represent heuristics for relatively…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-03-03 Xiao Li , Cristian-Ioan Vasile , Calin Belta