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Related papers: Settling the Reward Hypothesis

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The standard reinforcement learning (RL) formulation considers the expectation of the (discounted) cumulative reward. This is limiting in applications where we are concerned with not only the expected performance, but also the distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-13 Changjian Li , Krzysztof Czarnecki

I introduce a model of predictive scoring. A receiver wants to predict a sender's quality. An intermediary observes multiple features of the sender and aggregates them into a score. Based on the score, the receiver makes a decision. The…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-05-17 Ian Ball

Explanations of model behavior are commonly evaluated via proxy properties weakly tied to the purposes explanations serve in practice. We contribute a decision theoretic framework that treats explanations as information signals valued by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Ziyang Guo , Berk Ustun , Jessica Hullman

Desirability can be understood as an extension of Anscombe and Aumann's Bayesian decision theory to sets of expected utilities. At the core of desirability lies an assumption of linearity of the scale in which rewards are measured. It is a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Enrique Miranda , Marco Zaffalon

Robots can learn to imitate humans by inferring what the human is optimizing for. One common framework for this is Bayesian reward learning, where the robot treats the human's demonstrations and corrections as observations of their…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Joshua Hoegerman , Dylan P. Losey

The aim of this note is to prove a new discrepancy principle. The advantage of the new discrepancy principle compared with the known one consists of solving a minimization problem approximately, rather than exactly, and in the proof of a…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2015-06-26 A. G. Ramm

This article aims to develop a new account of scientific explanation for computer simulations. To this end, two questions are answered: what is the explanatory relation for computer simulations? and what kind of epistemic gain should be…

Other Computer Science · Computer Science 2019-04-03 Juan M. Durán

In business, politics and life, folk wisdom encourages people to aim for above-average results, but to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Here, we mathematically formalize and extend this folk wisdom. We model a time-limited…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-02-11 Ekaterina Landgren , Ryan E. Langendorf , Matthew G. Burgess

Designing reward functions is difficult: the designer has to specify what to do (what it means to complete the task) as well as what not to do (side effects that should be avoided while completing the task). To alleviate the burden on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Victoria Krakovna , Laurent Orseau , Richard Ngo , Miljan Martic , Shane Legg

We identify a fundamental incompatibility between the goals of accuracy, trust, and human-level reasoning in artificial intelligence (AI) systems, for strict mathematical definitions of these notions. We define accuracy of a system as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Rina Panigrahy , Vatsal Sharan

We introduce a new paradigm for game theory -- Bayesian satisfaction. This novel approach is a synthesis of the idea of Bayesian rationality introduced by Aumann, and satisfaction games. The concept of Bayesian rationality for which, in…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-07-26 Langford White , Oskar Rynkiewicz , Duong Nguyen , Hung Nguyen

Autonomous agents optimize the reward function we give them. What they don't know is how hard it is for us to design a reward function that actually captures what we want. When designing the reward, we might think of some specific training…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Dylan Hadfield-Menell , Smitha Milli , Pieter Abbeel , Stuart Russell , Anca Dragan

Reinforcement learning is commonly concerned with problems of maximizing accumulated rewards in Markov decision processes. Oftentimes, a certain goal state or a subset of the state space attain maximal reward. In such a case, the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Pavel Osinenko , Grigory Yaremenko , Georgiy Malaniya , Anton Bolychev , Alexander Gepperth

We study a setting in which two players play a (possibly approximate) Nash equilibrium of a bimatrix game, while a learner observes only their actions and has no knowledge of the equilibrium or the underlying game. A natural question is…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Annalisa Barbara , Riccardo Poiani , Martino Bernasconi , Andrea Celli

Justification theory is a unifying semantic framework. While it has its roots in non-monotonic logics, it can be applied to various areas in computer science, especially in explainable reasoning; its most central concept is a justification:…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Simon Marynissen , Bart Bogaerts , Marc Denecker

In this paper, we provide an effective characterization of all the subgame-perfect equilibria in infinite duration games played on finite graphs with mean-payoff objectives. To this end, we introduce the notion of requirement, and the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-04-22 Léonard Brice , Jean-François Raskin , Marie Van Den Bogaard

Reward design plays a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, serving as the bridge between feedback signals and model optimization. This survey provides a structured organization of reward modeling and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Miaomiao Ji , Yanqiu Wu , Zhibin Wu , Shoujin Wang , Jian Yang , Mark Dras , Usman Naseem

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on reasoning benchmarks via reinforcement learning requires a specific reward function, often binary, for each benchmark. This comes with two potential limitations: the need to design the reward, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Ariel Kwiatkowski , Natasha Butt , Ismail Labiad , Julia Kempe , Yann Ollivier

We consider the problem: is the optimal expected total reward to reach a goal state in a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) below a given threshold? We tackle this -- generally undecidable -- problem by computing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-01-24 Alexander Bork , Joost-Pieter Katoen , Tim Quatmann

We study repeated task assignment as an instrument for providing effort incentives. Unlike traditional incentive instruments, assignment of a task both determines who produces and provides incentives, and incentives for one worker spill…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-03 Yonghang Ji , Allen Vong