English
Related papers

Related papers: STARC: A General Framework For Quantifying Differe…

200 papers

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

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to train an agent from a reward function in a given environment, Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) seeks to recover the reward function from observing an expert's behavior. It is well known that, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Paul Rolland , Luca Viano , Norman Schuerhoff , Boris Nikolov , Volkan Cevher

A misspecified reward can degrade sample efficiency and induce undesired behaviors in reinforcement learning (RL) problems. We propose symbolic reward machines for incorporating high-level task knowledge when specifying the reward signals.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-22 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

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

Rewards serve as proxies for human preferences and play a crucial role in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). However, if these rewards are inherently imperfect, exhibiting various biases, they can adversely affect the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Sheng Ouyang , Yulan Hu , Ge Chen , Qingyang Li , Fuzheng Zhang , Yong Liu

Learning from human feedback has shown to be a useful approach in acquiring robot reward functions. However, expert feedback is often assumed to be drawn from an underlying unimodal reward function. This assumption does not always hold…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-20 Vivek Myers , Erdem Bıyık , Nima Anari , Dorsa Sadigh

The goal of the Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) task is to identify the underlying reward function and the corresponding optimal policy from a set of expert demonstrations. While most IRL algorithms' theoretical guarantees rely on a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-25 Ruijia Zhang , Siliang Zeng , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

We provide an original theoretical study of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) through the lens of reward compatibility, a novel framework to quantify the compatibility of a reward with the given expert's demonstrations. Intuitively, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Filippo Lazzati , Mirco Mutti , Alberto Metelli

In the physical world, people have dynamic preferences, e.g., the same situation can lead to satisfaction for some humans and to frustration for others. Personalization is called for. The same observation holds for online behavior with…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2017-08-16 Ziming Li , Julia Kiseleva , Maarten de Rijke , Artem Grotov

When language models (LMs) are trained via reinforcement learning (RL) to generate natural language "reasoning chains", their performance improves on a variety of difficult question answering tasks. Today, almost all successful applications…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Mehul Damani , Isha Puri , Stewart Slocum , Idan Shenfeld , Leshem Choshen , Yoon Kim , Jacob Andreas

In most practical applications of reinforcement learning, it is untenable to maintain direct estimates for individual states; in continuous-state systems, it is impossible. Instead, researchers often leverage state similarity (whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-03 Charline Le Lan , Marc G. Bellemare , Pablo Samuel Castro

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved many impressive results in recent years. However, tasks with sparse rewards or long horizons continue to pose significant challenges. To tackle these important problems, we propose a general…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-04-12 Carlos Florensa , Yan Duan , Pieter Abbeel

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a promising approach for teaching robots new behaviour. However, one of its main limitations is the need for carefully hand-coded reward signals by an expert. We argue that it is crucial to automate the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-08-09 Abdalkarim Mohtasib , Gerhard Neumann , Heriberto Cuayahuitl

We study a class of reinforcement learning problems where the reward signals for policy learning are generated by an internal reward model that is dependent on and jointly optimized with the policy. This interdependence between the policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Mengdi Li , Xufeng Zhao , Jae Hee Lee , Cornelius Weber , Stefan Wermter

We show that discounted methods for solving continuing reinforcement learning problems can perform significantly better if they center their rewards by subtracting out the rewards' empirical average. The improvement is substantial at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Abhishek Naik , Yi Wan , Manan Tomar , Richard S. Sutton

Effective memory management is essential for large language model agents to navigate long-horizon tasks. Recent research has explored using Reinforcement Learning to develop specialized memory manager agents. However, existing approaches…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Weitao Ma , Xiaocheng Feng , Lei Huang , Xiachong Feng , Zhanyu Ma , Jun Xu , Jiuchong Gao , Jinghua Hao , Renqing He , Bing Qin

Safety constraints and optimality are important, but sometimes conflicting criteria for controllers. Although these criteria are often solved separately with different tools to maintain formal guarantees, it is also common practice in…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-10 Pierre-François Massiani , Steve Heim , Friedrich Solowjow , Sebastian Trimpe

Rewards play a crucial role in reinforcement learning. To arrive at the desired policy, the design of a suitable reward function often requires significant domain expertise as well as trial-and-error. Here, we aim to minimize the effort…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-18 Zheng Wu , Wenzhao Lian , Vaibhav Unhelkar , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Stefan Schaal

This paper presents an interpretable reward design framework for reinforcement learning based constrained optimal control problems with state and terminal constraints. The problem is formalized within a standard partially observable Markov…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-05 Jingjie Ni , Fangfei Li , Xin Jin , Xianlun Peng , Yang Tang

Appropriate credit assignment for delay rewards is a fundamental challenge for reinforcement learning. To tackle this problem, we introduce a delay reward calibration paradigm inspired from a classification perspective. We hypothesize that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-26 Yixuan Liu , Hu Wang , Xiaowei Wang , Xiaoyue Sun , Liuyue Jiang , Minhui Xue