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This paper proposes a suite of rationality measures and associated theory for reinforcement learning agents, a property increasingly critical yet rarely explored. We define an action in deployment to be perfectly rational if it maximises…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Kejiang Qian , Amos Storkey , Fengxiang He

Common-sense physical reasoning is an essential ingredient for any intelligent agent operating in the real-world. For example, it can be used to simulate the environment, or to infer the state of parts of the world that are currently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-01 Sjoerd van Steenkiste , Michael Chang , Klaus Greff , Jürgen Schmidhuber

The foraging behavior of animals is a paradigm of target search in nature. Understanding which foraging strategies are optimal and how animals learn them are central challenges in modeling animal foraging. While the question of optimality…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2024-04-15 Gorka Muñoz-Gil , Andrea López-Incera , Lukas J. Fiderer , Hans J. Briegel

Learning about many things can provide numerous benefits to a reinforcement learning system. For example, learning many auxiliary value functions, in addition to optimizing the environmental reward, appears to improve both exploration and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Cam Linke , Nadia M. Ady , Martha White , Thomas Degris , Adam White

A fundamental question in neuroscience is how the brain creates an internal model of the world to guide actions using sequences of ambiguous sensory information. This is naturally formulated as a reinforcement learning problem under partial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-02 Minhae Kwon , Saurabh Daptardar , Paul Schrater , Xaq Pitkow

Agents that interact with other agents often do not know a priori what the other agents' strategies are, but have to maximise their own online return while interacting with and learning about others. The optimal adaptive behaviour under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-19 Luisa Zintgraf , Sam Devlin , Kamil Ciosek , Shimon Whiteson , Katja Hofmann

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to learn optimal decisions in unknown environments through experience of taking actions and observing the rewards gained. In some cases, the environment is not influenced by the actions of the RL…

Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Shuze Daniel Liu , Claire Chen , Shangtong Zhang

Optimal designs are usually model-dependent and likely to be sub-optimal if the postulated model is not correctly specified. In practice, it is common that a researcher has a list of candidate models at hand and a design has to be found…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-03-29 Mingyao Ai , Holger Dette , Zhengfu Liu , Jun Yu

Motivated by the well established idea that collective wisdom is greater than that of an individual, we propose a novel learning dynamics as a sort of companion to the Abelson model of opinion dynamics. Agents are assumed to make…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-16 Luka Baković , Giacomo Como , Fabio Fagnani , Anton Proskurnikov , Emma Tegling

In reinforcement learning, an agent interacts sequentially with an environment to maximize a reward, receiving only partial, probabilistic feedback. This creates a fundamental exploration-exploitation trade-off: the agent must explore to…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-27 Josep Lumbreras , Ruo Cheng Huang , Yanglin Hu , Marco Fanizza , Mile Gu

The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-25 Wuxia Chen , Taposh Banerjee , Jemin George , Carl Busart

The Exploration-Exploitation tradeoff arises in Reinforcement Learning when one cannot tell if a policy is optimal. Then, there is a constant need to explore new actions instead of exploiting past experience. In practice, it is common to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Lior Shani , Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor

This paper proposes models of learning process in teams of individuals who collectively execute a sequence of tasks and whose actions are determined by individual skill levels and networks of interpersonal appraisals and influence. The…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2016-10-03 Wenjun Mei , Noah E. Friedkin , Kyle Lewis , Francesco Bullo

Although exploratory behaviors are ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, their computational underpinnings are still largely unknown. Behavioral Psychology has identified learning as a primary drive underlying many exploratory behaviors.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-12-14 Daniel Y. Little , Friedrich T. Sommer

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning under safety requirements, in which an agent is trained to complete a given task, typically formalized as the maximization of a reward signal over time, while concurrently avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Tu-Hoa Pham , Giovanni De Magistris , Don Joven Agravante , Subhajit Chaudhury , Asim Munawar , Ryuki Tachibana

This technical note considers the sampling of outcomes that provide the greatest amount of information about the structure of underlying world models. This generalisation furnishes a principled approach to structure learning under a…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-12-25 Karl Friston , Lancelot Da Costa , Alexander Tschantz , Conor Heins , Christopher Buckley , Tim Verbelen , Thomas Parr

Reward functions are central in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding agents towards optimal decision-making. The complexity of RL tasks requires meticulously designed reward functions that effectively drive learning while avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Rati Devidze

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents often operate in partially observed and uncertain environments. Model-based RL suggests that this is best achieved by learning and exploiting a probabilistic model of the world. 'Active inference' is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Alexander Tschantz , Manuel Baltieri , Anil. K. Seth , Christopher L. Buckley

All biological and artificial agents must learn and make decisions given limits on their ability to process information. As such, a general theory of adaptive behavior should be able to account for the complex interactions between an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-08 Dilip Arumugam , Mark K. Ho , Noah D. Goodman , Benjamin Van Roy