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Related papers: A State Representation for Diminishing Rewards

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In traditional reinforcement learning (RL), the learner aims to solve a single objective optimization problem: find the policy that maximizes expected reward. However, in many real-world settings, it is important to optimize over multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Eric Eaton , Marcel Hussing , Michael Kearns , Aaron Roth , Sikata Bela Sengupta , Jessica Sorrell

Deep Reinforcement Learning has shown its ability in solving complicated problems directly from high-dimensional observations. However, in end-to-end settings, Reinforcement Learning algorithms are not sample-efficient and requires long…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Nicolò Botteghi , Mannes Poel , Beril Sirmacek , Christoph Brune

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise as decision-makers in dynamic settings, but their stateless nature necessitates creating a natural language representation of history. We present a unifying framework for systematically…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Lyle Goodyear , Rachel Guo , Ramesh Johari

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to explain observed strategic behavior by fitting reinforcement learning models to behavioral data. However, traditional IRL methods are only applicable when the observations are in the form of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-26 Antti Kangasrääsiö , Samuel Kaski

In reward-free reinforcement learning (RL), an agent explores the environment first without any reward information, in order to achieve certain learning goals afterwards for any given reward. In this paper we focus on reward-free RL under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Yuan Cheng , Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

Reward design remains a significant bottleneck in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. A popular alternative is reward learning, where reward functions are inferred from human feedback rather than manually specified.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Chaitanya Kharyal , Calarina Muslimani , Matthew E. Taylor

State representation learning, or the ability to capture latent generative factors of an environment, is crucial for building intelligent agents that can perform a wide variety of tasks. Learning such representations without supervision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-09 Ankesh Anand , Evan Racah , Sherjil Ozair , Yoshua Bengio , Marc-Alexandre Côté , R Devon Hjelm

The relationship between a reinforcement learning (RL) agent and an asynchronous environment is often ignored. Frequently used models of the interaction between an agent and its environment, such as Markov Decision Processes (MDP) or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-29 Jaden B. Travnik , Kory W. Mathewson , Richard S. Sutton , Patrick M. Pilarski

We consider a reinforcement learning setting introduced in (Maillard et al., NIPS 2011) where the learner does not have explicit access to the states of the underlying Markov decision process (MDP). Instead, she has access to several models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-09-16 Ronald Ortner , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Daniil Ryabko

TD-learning is a foundation reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm for value prediction. Critical to the accuracy of value predictions is the quality of state representations. In this work, we consider the question: how does end-to-end…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Yunhao Tang , Rémi Munos

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in real-world decision-making across diverse domains, including gaming, robotics, online advertising, public health, and natural language processing. Despite these advances, a…

Applications · Statistics 2026-01-23 Asim H. Gazi , Yongyi Guo , Daiqi Gao , Ziping Xu , Kelly W. Zhang , Susan A. Murphy

While many multi-armed bandit algorithms assume that rewards for all arms are constant across rounds, this assumption does not hold in many real-world scenarios. This paper considers the setting of recovering bandits (Pike-Burke &…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Yuto Tanimoto , Kenji Fukumizu

One of the significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) when dealing with noise is estimating latent states from observations. Causality provides rigorous theoretical support for ensuring that the underlying states can be uniquely…

In many practical applications of RL, it is expensive to observe state transitions from the environment. For example, in the problem of plasma control for nuclear fusion, computing the next state for a given state-action pair requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Viraj Mehta , Biswajit Paria , Jeff Schneider , Stefano Ermon , Willie Neiswanger

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to be often unsuccessful in environments with sparse extrinsic rewards. A possible countermeasure is to endow RL agents with an intrinsic reward function, or 'intrinsic motivation', which rewards the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Francesco Massari , Martin Biehl , Lisa Meeden , Ryota Kanai

Sequential decision-making agents struggle with long horizon tasks, since solving them requires multi-step reasoning. Most reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms address this challenge by improved credit assignment, introducing memory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Bogdan Mazoure , Jake Bruce , Doina Precup , Rob Fergus , Ankit Anand

In reinforcement learning with image-based inputs, it is crucial to establish a robust and generalizable state representation. Recent advancements in metric learning, such as deep bisimulation metric approaches, have shown promising results…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Jianda Chen , Wen Zheng Terence Ng , Zichen Chen , Sinno Jialin Pan , Tianwei Zhang

Since the earliest days of reinforcement learning, the workhorse method for assigning credit to actions over time has been temporal-difference (TD) learning, which propagates credit backward timestep-by-timestep. This approach suffers when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-25 David Raposo , Sam Ritter , Adam Santoro , Greg Wayne , Theophane Weber , Matt Botvinick , Hado van Hasselt , Francis Song

Experience reuse is key to sample-efficient reinforcement learning. One of the critical issues is how the experience is represented and stored. Previously, the experience can be stored in the forms of features, individual models, and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Wen-Ji Zhou , Yang Yu , Yingfeng Chen , Kai Guan , Tangjie Lv , Changjie Fan , Zhi-Hua Zhou

Efficient allocation is important in nature and human society, where individuals frequently compete for limited resources. The Minority Game (MG) is perhaps the simplest toy model to address this issue. However, most previous solutions…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-02-04 Guozhong Zheng , Weiran Cai , Guanxiao Qi , Jiqiang Zhang , Li Chen