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Recommendation Systems have become integral to modern user experiences, but lack transparency in their decision-making processes. Existing explainable recommendation methods are hindered by reliance on a post-hoc paradigm, wherein…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-12-04 Xiaohan Yu , Li Zhang , Chong Chen

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) techniques deal with the problem of deducing a reward function that explains the behavior of an expert agent who is assumed to act optimally in an underlying unknown task. In several problems of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Riccardo Poiani , Gabriele Curti , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

Recommender systems are central to digital platforms, yet they face a fundamental trade-off between accuracy and explainability. Black-box models achieve strong performance but lack interpretability needed for trust and adoption. Existing…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Yuyan Wang , Pan Li , Minmin Chen

Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Aviral Kumar , Xue Bin Peng , Sergey Levine

Counterfactual examples (CFs) are one of the most popular methods for attaching post-hoc explanations to machine learning (ML) models. However, existing CF generation methods either exploit the internals of specific models or depend on each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-10 Ziheng Chen , Fabrizio Silvestri , Jia Wang , He Zhu , Hongshik Ahn , Gabriele Tolomei

Reinforcement learning agents have demonstrated remarkable achievements in simulated environments. Data efficiency poses an impediment to carrying this success over to real environments. The design of data-efficient agents calls for a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Xiuyuan Lu , Benjamin Van Roy , Vikranth Dwaracherla , Morteza Ibrahimi , Ian Osband , Zheng Wen

In recent years, on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to many different continuous control tasks. While RL algorithms are often conceptually simple, their state-of-the-art implementations take numerous low-…

We focus on the task of creating a reinforcement learning agent that is inherently explainable -- with the ability to produce immediate local explanations by thinking out loud while performing a task and analyzing entire trajectories…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2022-10-10 Xiangyu Peng , Mark O. Riedl , Prithviraj Ammanabrolu

Recent research has turned to Reinforcement Learning (RL) to solve challenging decision problems, as an alternative to hand-tuned heuristics. RL can learn good policies without the need for modeling the environment's dynamics. Despite this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Pouya Hamadanian , Malte Schwarzkopf , Siddartha Sen , Mohammad Alizadeh

Reinforcement learning provides an automated framework for learning behaviors from high-level reward specifications, but in practice the choice of reward function can be crucial for good results -- while in principle the reward only needs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Abhishek Gupta , Aldo Pacchiano , Yuexiang Zhai , Sham M. Kakade , Sergey Levine

The complexity of designing reward functions has been a major obstacle to the wide application of deep reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. Describing an agent's desired behaviors and properties can be difficult, even for experts. A new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Wanqi Xue , Bo An , Shuicheng Yan , Zhongwen Xu

Many works in explainable AI have focused on explaining black-box classification models. Explaining deep reinforcement learning (RL) policies in a manner that could be understood by domain users has received much less attention. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Ronny Luss , Amit Dhurandhar , Miao Liu

Artificial intelligence progresses towards the "Era of Experience," where agents are expected to learn from continuous, grounded interaction. We argue that traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL), which typically represents value as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Xidong Feng , Bo Liu , Yan Song , Haotian Fu , Ziyu Wan , Girish A. Koushik , Zhiyuan Hu , Mengyue Yang , Ying Wen , Jun Wang

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to train an agent from a reward function in a given environment, Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) seeks to recover the reward function from observing an expert's behavior. It is well known that, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Paul Rolland , Luca Viano , Norman Schuerhoff , Boris Nikolov , Volkan Cevher

Recommender systems have been widely applied in different real-life scenarios to help us find useful information. In particular, Reinforcement Learning (RL) based recommender systems have become an emerging research topic in recent years,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Yuanguo Lin , Yong Liu , Fan Lin , Lixin Zou , Pengcheng Wu , Wenhua Zeng , Huanhuan Chen , Chunyan Miao

Recent developments in sequential experimental design look to construct a policy that can efficiently navigate the design space, in a way that maximises the expected information gain. Whilst there is work on achieving tractable policies for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Yasir Zubayr Barlas , Kizito Salako

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

While reinforcement learning (RL) demonstrated remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of language models, the training dynamics of RL in LLMs remain unclear. In this work, we provide an explanation of the RL training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xingwu Chen , Tianle Li , Difan Zou

This article is a gentle discussion about the field of reinforcement learning in practice, about opportunities and challenges, touching a broad range of topics, with perspectives and without technical details. The article is based on both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Yuxi Li

Transformers trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL) with outcome-based supervision can spontaneously develop the ability to generate intermediate reasoning steps (Chain-of-Thought). Yet the mechanism by which sparse rewards drive policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yuval Ran-Milo , Yotam Alexander , Shahar Mendel , Nadav Cohen