English
Related papers

Related papers: Leveraging Reward Consistency for Interpretable Fe…

200 papers

The aim of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is to infer a reward function $R$ from a policy $\pi$. This problem is difficult, for several reasons. First of all, there are typically multiple reward functions which are compatible with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Joar Skalse , Alessandro Abate

Incorporating high-level knowledge is an effective way to expedite reinforcement learning (RL), especially for complex tasks with sparse rewards. We investigate an RL problem where the high-level knowledge is in the form of reward machines,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Zhe Xu , Ivan Gavran , Yousef Ahmad , Rupak Majumdar , Daniel Neider , Ufuk Topcu , Bo Wu

We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Nadav Merlis

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically deal with maximizing the expected cumulative return (discounted or undiscounted, finite or infinite horizon). However, several crucial applications in the real world, such as drug discovery,…

In robotic systems, the performance of reinforcement learning depends on the rationality of predefined reward functions. However, manually designed reward functions often lead to policy failures due to inaccuracies. Inverse Reinforcement…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Yongkai Tian , Yirong Qi , Xin Yu , Wenjun Wu , Jie Luo

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved great success in solving complicated decision-making problems. Despite the successes, DRL is frequently criticized for many reasons, e.g., data inefficient, inflexible and intractable reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Weiqin Chen

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central problem in artificial intelligence. This problem consists of defining artificial agents that can learn optimal behaviour by interacting with an environment -- where the optimal behaviour is defined…

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Xinran Liang , Katherine Shu , Kimin Lee , Pieter Abbeel

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown its promising capabilities to learn optimal policies directly from trial and error. However, learning can be hindered if the goal of the learning, defined by the reward function, is "not optimal".…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-10-09 Yizheng Zhang , Andre Rosendo

Reward engineering has long been a challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) research, as it often requires extensive human effort and iterative processes of trial-and-error to design effective reward functions. In this paper, we propose…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Yufei Wang , Zhanyi Sun , Jesse Zhang , Zhou Xian , Erdem Biyik , David Held , Zackory Erickson

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents frequently face challenges in adapting to tasks outside their training distribution, including issues with over-fitting, catastrophic forgetting and sample inefficiency. Although the application of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Yizhao Jin , Greg Slabaugh , Simon Lucas

Large language model alignment via reinforcement learning depends critically on reward function quality. However, static, domain-specific reward models are often costly to train and exhibit poor generalization in out-of-distribution…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Andrew Zhuoer Feng , Cunxiang Wang , Bosi Wen , Yidong Wang , Yu Luo , Hongning Wang , Minlie Huang

Teaching large language models (LLMs) to reason during post-training typically relies on reinforcement learning with explicit outcome- or process-based reward functions. However, in many real-world settings, obtaining or defining such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Claudio Fanconi , Nicolás Astorga , Mihaela van der Schaar

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to discover better actions through exploration. However, typical exploration techniques aim to maximize rewards, often incurring high costs in both exploration and learning processes. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Akane Tsuboya , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in various domains, yet it often relies on carefully designed programmatic reward functions to guide agent behavior. Designing such reward functions can be challenging and may not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Qi Wang , Mian Wu , Yuyang Zhang , Mingqi Yuan , Wenyao Zhang , Haoxiang You , Yunbo Wang , Xin Jin , Xiaokang Yang , Wenjun Zeng

Reinforcement learning agents learn by encouraging behaviours which maximize their total reward, usually provided by the environment. In many environments, however, the reward is provided after a series of actions rather than each single…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Mohammad Reza Bonyadi , Rui Wang , Maryam Ziaei

How can we design good goals for arbitrarily intelligent agents? Reinforcement learning (RL) is a natural approach. Unfortunately, RL does not work well for generally intelligent agents, as RL agents are incentivised to shortcut the reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-05-11 Tom Everitt , Marcus Hutter

In reinforcement learning an agent interacts with the environment by taking actions and observing the next state and reward. When sampled probabilistically, these state transitions, rewards, and actions can all induce randomness in the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-30 Will Dabney , Mark Rowland , Marc G. Bellemare , Rémi Munos

Information gathering in a partially observable environment can be formulated as a reinforcement learning (RL), problem where the reward depends on the agent's uncertainty. For example, the reward can be the negative entropy of the agent's…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-05-12 Yash Satsangi , Sungsu Lim , Shimon Whiteson , Frans Oliehoek , Martha White

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is a promising way to achieve human-like autonomous driving. However, the low sample efficiency and difficulty of designing reward functions for DRL would hinder its applications in practice. In light of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Zhiyu Huang , Jingda Wu , Chen Lv