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Embodied AI agents exploit reward signal flaws through reward hacking, achieving high proxy scores while failing true objectives. We introduce Mechanistically Interpretable Task Decomposition (MITD), a hierarchical transformer architecture…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Subramanyam Sahoo , Jared Junkin

Reinforcement learning has shown promise in learning policies that can solve complex problems. However, manually specifying a good reward function can be difficult, especially for intricate tasks. Inverse reinforcement learning offers a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-28 Peter Henderson , Wei-Di Chang , Pierre-Luc Bacon , David Meger , Joelle Pineau , Doina Precup

Deep reinforcement learning can learn effective policies for a wide range of tasks, but is notoriously difficult to use due to instability and sensitivity to hyperparameters. The reasons for this remain unclear. When using standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-17 Aviral Kumar , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) and dynamic discrete choice (DDC) models explain sequential decision-making by recovering reward functions that rationalize observed behavior. Flexible IRL methods typically rely on machine learning but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Lars van der Laan , Aurelien Bibaut , Nathan Kallus

Learning from off-policy data is essential for sample-efficient reinforcement learning. In the present work, we build on the insight that the advantage function can be understood as the causal effect of an action on the return, and show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Hsiao-Ru Pan , Bernhard Schölkopf

We consider the problem of learning to perform a task from demonstrations given by teachers or experts, when some of the experts' demonstrations might be adversarial and demonstrate an incorrect way to perform the task. We propose a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Prithviraj Dasgupta

Current reinforcement learning algorithms train an agent using forward-generated trajectories, which provide little guidance so that the agent can explore as much as possible. While realizing the value of reinforcement learning results from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-09-06 KyungMin Ko

One approach for improving sample efficiency in cooperative multi-agent learning is to decompose overall tasks into sub-tasks that can be assigned to individual agents. We study this problem in the context of reward machines: symbolic tasks…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Ameesh Shah , Niklas Lauffer , Thomas Chen , Nikhil Pitta , Sanjit A. Seshia

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly developed as autonomous agents using reinforcement learning (agentic RL) that reason and act in interactive environments. However, sparse and sometimes unverifiable rewards make it extremely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xiaoqian Liu , Ke Wang , Yuchuan Wu , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li , Junge Zhang , Jianbin Jiao

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is to determine which state-action pairs are responsible for future rewards that are delayed. Reward redistribution serves as a solution to re-assign credits for each time step from observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Yudi Zhang , Yali Du , Biwei Huang , Ziyan Wang , Jun Wang , Meng Fang , Mykola Pechenizkiy

This paper introduces a novel method of adding intrinsic bonuses to task-oriented reward function in order to efficiently facilitate reinforcement learning search. While various bonuses have been designed to date, they are analogous to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Taisuke Kobayashi

This paper addresses the challenge of achieving high-quality and fast image generation that aligns with complex human preferences. While recent advancements in diffusion models and distillation have enabled rapid generation, the effective…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Yihong Luo , Tianyang Hu , Weijian Luo , Kenji Kawaguchi , Jing Tang

We develop a probabilistic framework for analysing model-based reinforcement learning in the episodic setting. We then apply it to study finite-time horizon stochastic control problems with linear dynamics but unknown coefficients and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Lukasz Szpruch , Tanut Treetanthiploet , Yufei Zhang

We investigate the explainability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies from a temporal perspective, focusing on the sequence of future outcomes associated with individual actions. In RL, value functions compress information about rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-08 Franco Ruggeri , Alessio Russo , Rafia Inam , Karl Henrik Johansson

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has emerged as a promising paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models particularly in mathematics. Current approaches in this domain present a clear trade-off:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Batuhan K. Karaman , Aditya Rawal , Suhaila Shakiah , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Mingyi Hong , Arijit Biswas , Ruida Zhou

Designing dense rewards is crucial for reinforcement learning (RL), yet in robotics it often demands extensive manual effort and lacks scalability. One promising solution is to view task progress as a dense reward signal, as it quantifies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Yuyang Liu , Chuan Wen , Yihang Hu , Dinesh Jayaraman , Yang Gao

Existing reinforcement learning methods for Chain-of-Thought reasoning suffer from two critical limitations. First, they operate as monolithic black boxes that provide undifferentiated reward signals, obscuring individual step contributions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Ziyuan Gao , Di Liang , Xianjie Wu , Philippe Morel , Minlong Peng

Episodic memory is a psychology term which refers to the ability to recall specific events from the past. We suggest one advantage of this particular type of memory is the ability to easily assign credit to a specific state when remembered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-05 Kenny J. Young , Richard S. Sutton , Shuo Yang

Although diffusion models have achieved strong results in decision-making tasks, their slow inference speed remains a key limitation. While consistency models offer a potential solution, existing applications to decision-making either…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Xintong Duan , Yutong He , Fahim Tajwar , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , J. Zico Kolter , Jeff Schneider

A computational problem in biological reward-based learning is how credit assignment is performed in the nucleus accumbens (NAc). Much research suggests that NAc dopamine encodes temporal-difference (TD) errors for learning value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Jonas Guan , Shon Eduard Verch , Claas Voelcker , Ethan C. Jackson , Nicolas Papernot , William A. Cunningham