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Related papers: Robust Reward Design for Markov Decision Processes

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In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), how to design a suitable reward signal to accelerate learning and stabilize convergence is a critical problem. The global reward signal assigns the same global reward to all agents…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-03-10 Hangyu Mao , Zhibo Gong , Zhen Xiao

In the last decade, Deep Reinforcement Learning has evolved into a powerful tool for complex sequential decision-making problems. It combines deep learning's proficiency in processing rich input signals with reinforcement learning's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Julien Roy

Design under uncertainty is a challenging problem, as a systems performance can be highly sensitive to variations in input parameters and model uncertainty. A conventional approach to addressing such problems is robust optimization, which…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-18 Maryam Ghasemzadeh , H M Dilshad Alam Digonta , Anand Balu Nellippallil , Anton van Beek

Autonomous agents optimize the reward function we give them. What they don't know is how hard it is for us to design a reward function that actually captures what we want. When designing the reward, we might think of some specific training…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Dylan Hadfield-Menell , Smitha Milli , Pieter Abbeel , Stuart Russell , Anca Dragan

A tenet of reinforcement learning is that the agent always observes rewards. However, this is not true in many realistic settings, e.g., a human observer may not always be available to provide rewards, sensors may be limited or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Alireza Kazemipour , Simone Parisi , Matthew E. Taylor , Michael Bowling

Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task. This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Dhawal Gupta , Yash Chandak , Scott M. Jordan , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

Reinforcement learning agents are fundamentally limited by the quality of the reward functions they learn from, yet reward design is often overlooked under the assumption that a well-defined reward is readily available. However, in…

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate transformative potential, yet their reasoning remains inconsistent and unreliable. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning is a key mechanism for improvement, but its effectiveness is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Pei-Chi Pan , Yingbin Liang , Sen Lin

We introduce a novel framework to account for sensitivity to rewards uncertainty in sequential decision-making problems. While risk-sensitive formulations for Markov decision processes studied so far focus on the distribution of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-16 Nelson Vadori , Sumitra Ganesh , Prashant Reddy , Manuela Veloso

Specifying reward functions for complex tasks like object manipulation or driving is challenging to do by hand. Reward learning seeks to address this by learning a reward model using human feedback on selected query policies. This shifts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Kush Bhatia , Wenshuo Guo , Jacob Steinhardt

In robust Markov decision processes (MDPs), the uncertainty in the transition kernel is addressed by finding a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. While much of the literature has focused on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Yue Wang , Alvaro Velasquez , George Atia , Ashley Prater-Bennette , Shaofeng Zou

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

The ability to compute reward-optimal policies for given and known finite Markov decision processes (MDPs) underpins a variety of applications across planning, controller synthesis, and verification. However, we often want policies (1) to…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Linus Heck , Filip Macák , Milan Češka , Sebastian Junges

Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Sourav Ganguly , Kishan Panaganti , Arnob Ghosh , Adam Wierman

Reward modeling (RM), which captures human preferences to align large language models (LLMs), is increasingly employed in tasks such as model finetuning, response filtering, and ranking. However, due to the inherent complexity of human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Pankayaraj Pathmanathan , Furong Huang

Reward models play a critical role in guiding large language models toward outputs that align with human expectations. However, an open challenge remains in effectively utilizing test-time compute to enhance reward model performance. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Jiaxin Guo , Zewen Chi , Li Dong , Qingxiu Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Furu Wei

Reward modeling has emerged as a crucial component in aligning large language models with human values. Significant attention has focused on using reward models as a means for fine-tuning generative models. However, the reward models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Brian Christian , Hannah Rose Kirk , Jessica A. F. Thompson , Christopher Summerfield , Tsvetomira Dumbalska

Robustness to noise is of utmost importance in reinforcement learning systems, particularly in military contexts where high stakes and uncertain environments prevail. Noise and uncertainty are inherent features of military operations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Lorenzo Nodari , Federico Cerutti

Reinforcement learning provides an automated framework for learning behaviors from high-level reward specifications, but in practice the choice of reward function can be crucial for good results -- while in principle the reward only needs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Abhishek Gupta , Aldo Pacchiano , Yuexiang Zhai , Sham M. Kakade , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement Learning is a powerful framework for training agents to navigate different situations, but it is susceptible to changes in environmental dynamics. However, solving Markov Decision Processes that are robust to changes is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Etash Kumar Guha