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Related papers: Why Online Reinforcement Learning is Causal

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We study a security threat to reinforcement learning where an attacker poisons the learning environment to force the agent into executing a target policy chosen by the attacker. As a victim, we consider RL agents whose objective is to find…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Amin Rakhsha , Goran Radanovic , Rati Devidze , Xiaojin Zhu , Adish Singla

Offline Reinforcement Learning (ORL) enablesus to separately study the two interlinked processes of reinforcement learning: collecting informative experience and inferring optimal behaviour. The second step has been widely studied in the…

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms find applications in inventory control, recommender systems, vehicular traffic management, cloud computing and robotics. The real-world complications of many tasks arising in these domains makes them…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-03 Sindhu Padakandla

Real-world autonomous decision-making systems, from robots to recommendation engines, must operate in environments that change over time. While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown an impressive ability to learn optimal policies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Jonathan Clifford Balloch

Integrating causal inference (CI) with reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm to address critical limitations in classical RL, including low explainability, lack of robustness and generalization failures. Traditional…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Cristiano da Costa Cunha , Wei Liu , Tim French , Ajmal Mian

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) requires the collection of interventional data, which is sometimes expensive and even unethical in the real world, such as in the autonomous driving and the medical field. Offline reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Wenxuan Zhu , Chao Yu , Qiang Zhang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a learning paradigm in which the agent learns from its environment through trial and error. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms represent the agent's policies using neural networks, making their…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Jasmina Gajcin , Jovan Jeromela , Ivana Dusparic

The challenge of developing powerful and general Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents has received increasing attention in recent years. Much of this effort has focused on the single-agent setting, in which an agent maximizes a predefined…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-21 Jiachen Yang , Ang Li , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Peter Sunehag , Edward Hughes , Hongyuan Zha

Reinforcement learning is well suited for optimizing policies of recommender systems. Current solutions mostly focus on model-free approaches, which require frequent interactions with the real environment, and thus are expensive in model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Xueying Bai , Jian Guan , Hongning Wang

We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Nadav Merlis

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful technique for training intelligent agents, but understanding why these agents make specific decisions can be quite challenging. This lack of transparency in RL models has been a long-standing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Wenhao Lu , Xufeng Zhao , Thilo Fryen , Jae Hee Lee , Mengdi Li , Sven Magg , Stefan Wermter

Reinforcement learning has been shown to perform a range of complex tasks through interaction with an environment or collected leveraging experience. However, many of these approaches presume optimal or near optimal experiences or the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Chapman Siu , Jason Traish , Richard Yi Da Xu

Reinforcement learning is a machine learning approach based on behavioral psychology. It is focused on learning agents that can acquire knowledge and learn to carry out new tasks by interacting with the environment. However, a problem…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Hugo Muñoz , Ernesto Portugal , Angel Ayala , Bruno Fernandes , Francisco Cruz

Reinforcement learning (RL) has produced spectacular results in games, robotics, and continuous control. Yet, despite these successes, learned policies often fail to generalize beyond their training distribution, limiting real-world impact.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 André Biedenkapp

When interacting with people, AI agents do not just influence the state of the world -- they also influence the actions people take in response to the agent, and even their underlying intentions and strategies. Accounting for and leveraging…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Joey Hong , Sergey Levine , Anca Dragan

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Daniel Shin , Daniel S. Brown , Anca D. Dragan

Learning about the causal structure of the world is a fundamental problem for human cognition. Causal models and especially causal learning have proved to be difficult for large pretrained models using standard techniques of deep learning.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Eunice Yiu , Kelsey Allen , Shiry Ginosar , Alison Gopnik

[Context] Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has achieved notable success in environments where agents must learn coordinated behaviors. However, transferring knowledge across agents remains challenging in non-stationary environments…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Kathrin Korte , Christian Medeiros Adriano , Sona Ghahremani , Holger Giese

We propose a unified mechanism for achieving coordination and communication in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), through rewarding agents for having causal influence over other agents' actions. Causal influence is assessed using…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective tool for real-world recommender systems with its capacity to model the dynamic interest of users and its interactive nature. Most existing offline RL recommender systems focus on…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Yi Zhang , Ruihong Qiu , Jiajun Liu , Sen Wang