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Related papers: Reward Centering

200 papers

Reward design remains a significant bottleneck in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. A popular alternative is reward learning, where reward functions are inferred from human feedback rather than manually specified.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Chaitanya Kharyal , Calarina Muslimani , Matthew E. Taylor

Recent work has shown that reinforcement learning agents can develop policies that exploit spurious correlations between rewards and observations. This phenomenon, known as policy confounding, arises because the agent's policy influences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Miguel Suau

We consider the problem of learning control policies that optimize a reward function while satisfying constraints due to considerations of safety, fairness, or other costs. We propose a new algorithm, Projection-Based Constrained Policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Tsung-Yen Yang , Justinian Rosca , Karthik Narasimhan , Peter J. Ramadge

The alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critically dependent on reward models trained on costly human preference data. While recent work explores bypassing this cost with AI feedback, these methods often lack a rigorous theoretical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Yi-Chen Li , Tian Xu , Yang Yu , Xuqin Zhang , Xiong-Hui Chen , Zhongxiang Ling , Ningjing Chao , Lei Yuan , Zhi-Hua Zhou

Transfer of recent advances in deep reinforcement learning to real-world applications is hindered by high data demands and thus low efficiency and scalability. Through independent improvements of components such as replay buffers or more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 André Eberhard , Houssam Metni , Georg Fahland , Alexander Stroh , Pascal Friederich

Option-critic learning is a general-purpose reinforcement learning (RL) framework that aims to address the issue of long term credit assignment by leveraging temporal abstractions. However, when dealing with extended timescales, discounting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Akshay Dharmavaram , Matthew Riemer , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We study a class of reinforcement learning problems where the reward signals for policy learning are generated by an internal reward model that is dependent on and jointly optimized with the policy. This interdependence between the policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Mengdi Li , Xufeng Zhao , Jae Hee Lee , Cornelius Weber , Stefan Wermter

Despite the numerous advances, reinforcement learning remains away from widespread acceptance for autonomous controller design as compared to classical methods due to lack of ability to effectively tackle the reality gap. The reliance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Narendra Patwardhan , Zequn Wang

We introduce the technique of adaptive discretization to design an efficient model-based episodic reinforcement learning algorithm in large (potentially continuous) state-action spaces. Our algorithm is based on optimistic one-step value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Sean R. Sinclair , Tianyu Wang , Gauri Jain , Siddhartha Banerjee , Christina Lee Yu

In model-based reinforcement learning, the transition matrix and reward vector are often estimated from random samples subject to noise. Even if the estimated model is an unbiased estimate of the true underlying model, the value function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-09 Xun Tang , Lexing Ying , Yuhua Zhu

In reinforcement learning, Return, which is the weighted accumulated future rewards, and Value, which is the expected return, serve as the objective that guides the learning of the policy. In classic RL, return is defined as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Yufei Wang , Qiwei Ye , Tie-Yan Liu

Assigning resources in business processes execution is a repetitive task that can be effectively automated. However, different automation methods may give varying results that may not be optimal. Proper resource allocation is crucial as it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-02 Kamil Żbikowski , Michał Ostapowicz , Piotr Gawrysiak

Data generation and labeling are usually an expensive part of learning for robotics. While active learning methods are commonly used to tackle the former problem, preference-based learning is a concept that attempts to solve the latter by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-11 Erdem Bıyık , Dorsa Sadigh

In order to solve a task using reinforcement learning, it is necessary to first formalise the goal of that task as a reward function. However, for many real-world tasks, it is very difficult to manually specify a reward function that never…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-13 Joar Skalse , Lucy Farnik , Sumeet Ramesh Motwani , Erik Jenner , Adam Gleave , Alessandro Abate

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

In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Grigorii Veviurko , Wendelin Böhmer , Mathijs de Weerdt

This paper discusses a system that accelerates reinforcement learning by using transfer from related tasks. Without such transfer, even if two tasks are very similar at some abstract level, an extensive re-learning effort is required. The…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-06-10 C. Drummond

This paper is dedicated to the application of reinforcement learning combined with neural networks to the general formulation of user scheduling problem. Our simulator resembles real world problems by means of stochastic changes in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-11-10 Filipp Skomorokhov , George Ovchinnikov

We present a distributional approach to theoretical analyses of reinforcement learning algorithms for constant step-sizes. We demonstrate its effectiveness by presenting simple and unified proofs of convergence for a variety of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-30 Philip Amortila , Doina Precup , Prakash Panangaden , Marc G. Bellemare

Learning near-optimal behaviour from an expert's demonstrations typically relies on the assumption that the learner knows the features that the true reward function depends on. In this paper, we study the problem of learning from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-28 Luis Haug , Sebastian Tschiatschek , Adish Singla