English
Related papers

Related papers: Empirical Design in Reinforcement Learning

200 papers

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms suffer from the dependency on accurately engineered reward functions to properly guide the learning agents to do the required tasks. Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) addresses that by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Youssef Abdelkareem , Shady Shehata , Fakhri Karray

Advancements in large language models (LLMs) have sparked a growing interest in measuring and understanding their behavior through experimental economics. However, there is still a lack of established guidelines for designing economic…

General Economics · Economics 2025-07-17 Shu Wang , Zijun Yao , Shuhuai Zhang , Jianuo Gai , Tracy Xiao Liu , Songfa Zhong

Causal structure learning is a key problem in many domains. Causal structures can be learnt by performing experiments on the system of interest. We address the largely unexplored problem of designing a batch of experiments that each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-25 Scott Sussex , Andreas Krause , Caroline Uhler

Reinforcement learning studies how an agent should interact with an environment to maximize its cumulative reward. A standard way to study this question abstractly is to ask how many samples an agent needs from the environment to learn an…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-12-21 Daochen Wang , Aarthi Sundaram , Robin Kothari , Ashish Kapoor , Martin Roetteler

Due to the realization that deep reinforcement learning algorithms trained on high-dimensional tasks can strongly overfit to their training environments, there have been several studies that investigated the generalization performance of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-06 Safa Alver , Doina Precup

Data-driven, machine learning (ML) models of atomistic interactions are often based on flexible and non-physical functions that can relate nuanced aspects of atomic arrangements into predictions of energies and forces. As a result, these…

Materials Science · Physics 2024-05-15 Bartosz Barzdajn , Christopher P. Race

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate transformative potential, yet their reasoning remains inconsistent and unreliable. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning is a key mechanism for improvement, but its effectiveness is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Pei-Chi Pan , Yingbin Liang , Sen Lin

Tactical selection of experiments to estimate an underlying model is an innate task across various fields. Since each experiment has costs associated with it, selecting statistically significant experiments becomes necessary. Classic linear…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-30 Raj K. Velicheti , Amber Srivastava , Srinivasa M. Salapaka

Interest in reinforcement learning (RL) for large-scale systems, comprising extensive populations of intelligent agents interacting with heterogeneous environments, has surged significantly across diverse scientific domains in recent years.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-16 Wei Zhang , Jr-Shin Li

Learning about many things can provide numerous benefits to a reinforcement learning system. For example, learning many auxiliary value functions, in addition to optimizing the environmental reward, appears to improve both exploration and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Cam Linke , Nadia M. Ady , Martha White , Thomas Degris , Adam White

Much research on Machine Learning testing relies on empirical studies that evaluate and show their potential. However, in this context empirical results are sensitive to a number of parameters that can adversely impact the results of the…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-09-12 Salah Ghamizi , Maxime Cordy , Yuejun Guo , Mike Papadakis , And Yves Le Traon

Reinforcement learning is now widely adopted as the final stage of large language model training, especially for reasoning-style tasks such as maths problems. Typically, models attempt each question many times during a single training step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Thomas Foster , Anya Sims , Johannes Forkel , Mattie Fellows , Jakob Foerster

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 problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-25 Wuxia Chen , Taposh Banerjee , Jemin George , Carl Busart

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents often operate in partially observed and uncertain environments. Model-based RL suggests that this is best achieved by learning and exploiting a probabilistic model of the world. 'Active inference' is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Alexander Tschantz , Manuel Baltieri , Anil. K. Seth , Christopher L. Buckley

Reinforcement learning algorithms are generally designed to maximize the expected return across a population. However, a policy that is optimal on average may be suboptimal for certain individuals, leading to potential safety concerns. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Jingyi Li , Peng Wu , Chengchun Shi

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning when provided with (1) a baseline control policy and (2) a set of constraints that the learner must satisfy. The baseline policy can arise from demonstration data or a teacher agent and may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Tsung-Yen Yang , Justinian Rosca , Karthik Narasimhan , Peter J. Ramadge

Meticulously analysing the empirical strengths and weaknesses of reinforcement learning methods in hard (challenging) environments is essential to inspire innovations and assess progress in the field. In tabular reinforcement learning,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Michelangelo Conserva , Paulo Rauber

In many reinforcement learning tasks, the goal is to learn a policy to manipulate an agent, whose design is fixed, to maximize some notion of cumulative reward. The design of the agent's physical structure is rarely optimized for the task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 David Ha