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Reward Machines (RMs) are an established mechanism in Reinforcement Learning (RL) to represent and learn sparse, temporally extended tasks with non-Markovian rewards. RMs rely on high-level information in the form of labels that are emitted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Thomas Krug , Daniel Neider

Although in recent years reinforcement learning has become very popular the number of successful applications to different kinds of operations research problems is rather scarce. Reinforcement learning is based on the well-studied dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-03 Manuel Schneckenreither

Solving a reinforcement learning problem typically involves correctly prespecifying the reward signal from which the algorithm learns. Here, we approach the problem of reward signal design by using an evolutionary approach to perform a…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-05-19 Rafal Muszynski , Katja Hofmann , Jun Wang

In this paper, we study reinforcement learning in Markov Decision Processes with Probabilistic Reward Machines (PRMs), a form of non-Markovian reward commonly found in robotics tasks. We design an algorithm for PRMs that achieves a regret…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-08-21 Xiaofeng Lin , Xuezhou Zhang

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…

Learning a near optimal policy in a partially observable system remains an elusive challenge in contemporary reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider episodic reinforcement learning in a reward-mixing Markov decision process (MDP).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Jeongyeol Kwon , Yonathan Efroni , Constantine Caramanis , Shie Mannor

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

Reward specification plays a central role in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding the agent's behavior. To express non-Markovian rewards, formalisms such as reward machines have been introduced to capture dependencies on histories. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Rajarshi Roy , Anirban Majumdar , Ritam Raha , David Parker , Marta Kwiatkowska

Teaching robots novel skills with demonstrations via human-in-the-loop data collection techniques like kinesthetic teaching or teleoperation puts a heavy burden on human supervisors. In contrast to this paradigm, it is often significantly…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-04-24 Daniel Yang , Davin Tjia , Jacob Berg , Dima Damen , Pulkit Agrawal , Abhishek Gupta

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework which is suitable for both the batch RL setting and the setting where there are many reward functions of interest. During the exploration phase, an agent collects samples without using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ruosong Wang , Simon S. Du , Lin F. Yang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

We study a Markov matching market involving a planner and a set of strategic agents on the two sides of the market. At each step, the agents are presented with a dynamical context, where the contexts determine the utilities. The planner…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-09 Yifei Min , Tianhao Wang , Ruitu Xu , Zhaoran Wang , Michael I. Jordan , Zhuoran Yang

This paper presents a novel approach to Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) that combines cooperative task decomposition with the learning of reward machines (RMs) encoding the structure of the sub-tasks. The proposed method helps…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Leo Ardon , Daniel Furelos-Blanco , Alessandra Russo

Reward function design and exploration time are arguably the biggest obstacles to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real world. In many real-world tasks, designing a reward function takes considerable hand…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-06-14 Pierre Sermanet , Kelvin Xu , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Aviral Kumar , Xue Bin Peng , Sergey Levine

We study reinforcement learning methods with linear function approximation under non-Markov state and cost processes. We first consider the policy evaluation method and show that the algorithm converges under suitable ergodicity conditions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Ali Devran Kara

The commonly used Reinforcement Learning (RL) model, MDPs (Markov Decision Processes), has a basic premise that rewards depend on the current state and action only. However, many real-world tasks are non-Markovian, which has long-term…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Ruixuan Miao , Xu Lu , Cong Tian , Bin Yu , Zhenhua Duan

There are situations in which an agent should receive rewards only after having accomplished a series of previous tasks, that is, rewards are non-Markovian. One natural and quite general way to represent history-dependent rewards is via a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Gavin Rens , Jean-François Raskin , Raphaël Reynouad , Giuseppe Marra

In reinforcement learning (RL), an agent learns to perform a task by interacting with an environment and receiving feedback (a numerical reward) for its actions. However, the assumption that rewards are always observable is often not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Simone Parisi , Montaser Mohammedalamen , Alireza Kazemipour , Matthew E. Taylor , Michael Bowling

Preference-based learning of reward functions, where the reward function is learned using comparison data, has been well studied for complex robotic tasks such as autonomous driving. Existing algorithms have focused on learning reward…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-05 Sydney M. Katz , Amir Maleki , Erdem Bıyık , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Reward machines (RMs) are a recent formalism for representing the reward function of a reinforcement learning task through a finite-state machine whose edges encode subgoals of the task using high-level events. The structure of RMs enables…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Daniel Furelos-Blanco , Mark Law , Anders Jonsson , Krysia Broda , Alessandra Russo