English
Related papers

Related papers: Informativeness of Reward Functions in Reinforceme…

200 papers

Providing a suitable reward function to reinforcement learning can be difficult in many real world applications. While inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) holds promise for automatically learning reward functions from demonstrations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Lantao Yu , Tianhe Yu , Chelsea Finn , Stefano Ermon

Inverse Reinforcement Learning addresses the problem of inferring an expert's reward function from demonstrations. However, in many applications, we not only have access to the expert's near-optimal behavior, but we also observe part of her…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Giorgia Ramponi , Gianluca Drappo , Marcello Restelli

Humans are spectacular reinforcement learners, constantly learning from and adjusting to experience and feedback. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily mean humans are fast learners. When tasks are challenging, learning can become…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Mark A. Rucker , Layne T. Watson , Matthew S. Gerber , Laura E. Barnes

Designing effective reward functions is crucial to training reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. However, this design is non-trivial, even for domain experts, due to the subjective nature of certain tasks that are hard to quantify…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Rishi Hazra , Alkis Sygkounas , Andreas Persson , Amy Loutfi , Pedro Zuidberg Dos Martires

The problem of reward design examines the interaction between a leader and a follower, where the leader aims to shape the follower's behavior to maximize the leader's payoff by modifying the follower's reward function. Current approaches to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-10 Shuo Wu , Haoxiang Ma , Jie Fu , Shuo Han

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) is inspired by the way human infants and animals learn from the environment. The setting is somewhat idealized because, in actual tasks, other agents in the environment have their own goals and behave adaptively…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Yue Lin , Wenhao Li , Hongyuan Zha , Baoxiang Wang

Learning a reward function from demonstrations suffers from low sample-efficiency. Even with abundant data, current inverse reinforcement learning methods that focus on learning from a single environment can fail to handle slight changes in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Thomas Kleine Buening , Victor Villin , Christos Dimitrakakis

In this study, we present a transductive inference approach on that reward information propagation graph, which enables the effective estimation of rewards for unlabelled data in offline reinforcement learning. Reward inference is the key…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Bohao Qu , Xiaofeng Cao , Qing Guo , Yi Chang , Ivor W. Tsang , Chengqi Zhang

Positive affect has been linked to increased interest, curiosity and satisfaction in human learning. In reinforcement learning, extrinsic rewards are often sparse and difficult to define, intrinsically motivated learning can help address…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Dean Zadok , Daniel McDuff , Ashish Kapoor

When we design and deploy an Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, reward functions motivates agents to achieve an objective. An incorrect or incomplete specification of the objective can result in behavior that does not align with human…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Zhaoyue Wang

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

Extrinsic rewards can effectively guide reinforcement learning (RL) agents in specific tasks. However, extrinsic rewards frequently fall short in complex environments due to the significant human effort needed for their design and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Mingqi Yuan , Roger Creus Castanyer , Bo Li , Xin Jin , Wenjun Zeng , Glen Berseth

This paper presents a novel approach combining inductive logic programming with reinforcement learning to improve training performance and explainability. We exploit inductive learning of answer set programs from noisy examples to learn a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Celeste Veronese , Daniele Meli , Alessandro Farinelli

Reinforcement Learning (RL) in environments with complex, history-dependent reward structures poses significant challenges for traditional methods. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that leverages automaton-based feedback to guide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Mahyar Alinejad , Alvaro Velasquez , Yue Wang , George Atia

Multi-agent social dilemmas, such as the tragedy of the commons, capture settings where individual incentives conflict with collective well-being, making these systems highly vulnerable to collapse under disruptions. In this context, this…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Manuela Chacon-Chamorro , Luis Felipe Giraldo , Nicanor Quijano

Designing optimal reward functions has been desired but extremely difficult in reinforcement learning (RL). When it comes to modern complex tasks, sophisticated reward functions are widely used to simplify policy learning yet even a tiny…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Ning Wei , Jiahua Liang , Di Xie , Shiliang Pu

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable results in image generation, and have similarly been used to learn high-performing policies in sequential decision-making tasks. Decision-making diffusion models can be trained on lower-quality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Felipe Nuti , Tim Franzmeyer , João F. Henriques

In complex real-world tasks such as robotic manipulation and autonomous driving, collecting expert demonstrations is often more straightforward than specifying precise learning objectives and task descriptions. Learning from expert data can…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Daulet Baimukashev , Gokhan Alcan , Kevin Sebastian Luck , Ville Kyrki

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) actively elicit user preferences to generate adaptive recommendations. Mainstream reinforcement learning-based CRS solutions heavily rely on handcrafted reward functions, which may not be aligned…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Zhendong Chu , Nan Wang , Hongning Wang