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Safety is a critical hurdle that limits the application of deep reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world control tasks. To this end, constrained reinforcement learning leverages cost functions to improve safety in constrained Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-26 Tairan He , Weiye Zhao , Changliu Liu

Reward function is essential in reinforcement learning (RL), serving as the guiding signal to incentivize agents to solve given tasks, however, is also notoriously difficult to design. In many cases, only imperfect rewards are available,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Jianxiong Li , Xiao Hu , Haoran Xu , Jingjing Liu , Xianyuan Zhan , Qing-Shan Jia , Ya-Qin Zhang

The optimal objective is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how policies are evaluated and optimized. While total return maximization is the ideal objective in RL, discounted return maximization is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Shuyu Yin , Fei Wen , Peilin Liu , Tao Luo

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

Value function factorization methods have become a dominant approach for cooperative multiagent reinforcement learning under a centralized training and decentralized execution paradigm. By factorizing the optimal joint action-value function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-14 Yongsheng Mei , Hanhan Zhou , Tian Lan

Strong worst-case performance bounds for episodic reinforcement learning exist but fortunately in practice RL algorithms perform much better than such bounds would predict. Algorithms and theory that provide strong problem-dependent bounds…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Andrea Zanette , Emma Brunskill

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

Evolutionary strategies have recently been shown to achieve competing levels of performance for complex optimization problems in reinforcement learning. In such problems, one often needs to optimize an objective function subject to a set of…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Youssef Diouane , Aurelien Lucchi , Vihang Patil

In offline reinforcement learning, a policy learns to maximize cumulative rewards with a fixed collection of data. Towards conservative strategy, current methods choose to regularize the behavior policy or learn a lower bound of the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Hongchang Zhang , Jianzhun Shao , Yuhang Jiang , Shuncheng He , Xiangyang Ji

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Kianté Brantley , Hal Daumé , Miroslav Dudik , Robert Schapire

The open-ended generation in LLMs usually requires multi-dimensional rubrics to adequately assess quality and guide the improvement of reinforcement learning. However, a critical dilemma inherent in this training paradigm is the imbalanced…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yu Huang , Zihua Zhao , Zhaoxin Huan , Wanli Gu , Feng Hong , Xinmu Ge , Lin Yuan , Weichang Wu , Qiang Hu , Xiaolu Zhang , Jun Zhou , Jiangchao Yao

Value function approximation is important in modern reinforcement learning (RL) problems especially when the state space is (infinitely) large. Despite the importance and wide applicability of value function approximation, its theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-24 Hanlin Zhu , Ruosong Wang , Jason D. Lee

A common approach for defining a reward function for Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) problems is the weighted sum of the multiple objectives. The weights are then treated as design parameters dependent on the expertise (and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-04 Arpan Kusari , Jonathan P. How

Reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome-based rewards has proven effective for improving large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, its success often depends on the base model occasionally sampling correct solutions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jatin Prakash , Anirudh Buvanesh

The use of Potential-Based Reward Shaping (PBRS) has shown great promise in the ongoing research effort to tackle sample inefficiency in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, choosing the right potential function remains an open challenge.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Giuseppe Canonaco , Leo Ardon , Alberto Pozanco , Daniel Borrajo

Designing reinforcement learning (RL) agents is typically a difficult process that requires numerous design iterations. Learning can fail for a multitude of reasons, and standard RL methods provide too few tools to provide insight into the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-24 James MacGlashan , Evan Archer , Alisa Devlic , Takuma Seno , Craig Sherstan , Peter R. Wurman , Peter Stone

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are highly sensitive to reward function specification, which remains a central challenge limiting their broad applicability. We present ARM-FM: Automated Reward Machines via Foundation Models, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Roger Creus Castanyer , Faisal Mohamed , Pablo Samuel Castro , Cyrus Neary , Glen Berseth

Existing studies on constrained reinforcement learning (RL) may obtain a well-performing policy in the training environment. However, when deployed in a real environment, it may easily violate constraints that were originally satisfied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-06 Zhongchang Sun , Sihong He , Fei Miao , Shaofeng Zou

Zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) promises to provide agents that can perform any task in an environment after an offline, reward-free pre-training phase. Methods leveraging successor measures and successor features have shown strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Scott Jeen , Tom Bewley , Jonathan M. Cullen

In Reinforcement Learning (abbreviated as RL), an agent interacts with the environment via a set of possible actions, and a reward is generated from some unknown distribution. The task here is to find an optimal set of actions such that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Aditi Anand , Suman Banerjee , Dildar Ali
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