Related papers: Bad Habits: Policy Confounding and Out-of-Trajecto…
Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning agents can develop policies that exploit spurious correlations between rewards and observations. This phenomenon, known as policy confounding, arises because the agent's policy influences…
In order for humans to confidently decide where to employ RL agents for real-world tasks, a human developer must validate that the agent will perform well at test-time. Some policy interpretability methods facilitate this by capturing the…
The increased complexity of state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have resulted in an opacity that inhibits explainability and understanding. This has led to the development of several post-hoc explainability methods that…
In complex tasks where the reward function is not straightforward and consists of a set of objectives, multiple reinforcement learning (RL) policies that perform task adequately, but employ different strategies can be trained by adjusting…
Why do reinforcement learning (RL) policies fail or succeed? This is a challenging question due to the complex, high-dimensional nature of agent-environment interactions. In this work, we take a causal perspective on explaining the behavior…
There is increasing focus on adapting predictive models into agent-like systems, most notably AI assistants based on language models. We outline two structural reasons for why these models can fail when turned into agents. First, we discuss…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a general framework for adaptive control, which has proven to be efficient in many domains, e.g., board games, video games or autonomous vehicles. In such problems, an agent faces a sequential decision-making…
Behavioural characterizations (BCs) of decision-making agents, or their policies, are used to study outcomes of training algorithms and as part of the algorithms themselves to encourage unique policies, match expert policy or restrict…
Reinforcement learning has been shown to perform a range of complex tasks through interaction with an environment or collected leveraging experience. However, many of these approaches presume optimal or near optimal experiences or the…
While Reinforcement Learning can achieve impressive results for complex tasks, the learned policies are generally prone to fail in downstream tasks with even minor model mismatch or unexpected perturbations. Recent works have demonstrated…
When developing reinforcement learning agents, the standard approach is to train an agent to converge to a fixed policy that is as close to optimal as possible for a single fixed reward function. If different agent behaviour is required in…
Policy advice is a transfer learning method where a student agent is able to learn faster via advice from a teacher. However, both this and other reinforcement learning transfer methods have little theoretical analysis. This paper formally…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents typically optimize their policies by performing expensive backward passes to update their network parameters. However, some agents can solve new tasks without updating any parameters by simply conditioning…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to…
Model-based Reinforcement Learning approaches have the promise of being sample efficient. Much of the progress in learning dynamics models in RL has been made by learning models via supervised learning. But traditional model-based…
Machine Learning models become increasingly proficient in complex tasks. However, even for experts in the field, it can be difficult to understand what the model learned. This hampers trust and acceptance, and it obstructs the possibility…
Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…
Reinforcement learning (RL) systems can be complex and non-interpretable, making it challenging for non-AI experts to understand or intervene in their decisions. This is due in part to the sequential nature of RL in which actions are chosen…
Robust policies enable reinforcement learning agents to effectively adapt to and operate in unpredictable, dynamic, and ever-changing real-world environments. Factored representations, which break down complex state and action spaces into…
Reinforcement learning algorithms describe how an agent can learn an optimal action policy in a sequential decision process, through repeated experience. In a given environment, the agent policy provides him some running and terminal…