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Related papers: Robust Reward Design for Markov Decision Processes

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In reinforcement learning (RL), an agent learns to perform a task by interacting with an environment and receiving feedback (a numerical reward) for its actions. However, the assumption that rewards are always observable is often not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Simone Parisi , Montaser Mohammedalamen , Alireza Kazemipour , Matthew E. Taylor , Michael Bowling

The Robust Markov Decision Process (RMDP) framework focuses on designing control policies that are robust against the parameter uncertainties due to the mismatches between the simulator model and real-world settings. An RMDP problem is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Kishan Panaganti , Dileep Kalathil

Stepwise model routing improves the efficiency of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) by assigning each reasoning step to a suitable model. Recent methods formulate routing as a sequential decision process and train the router with reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Shenghao Ye , Yu Guo , Zhengheng Li , Shuangwu Chen , Jian Yang

Reward models (RMs) play a crucial role in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), aligning model behavior with human preferences. However, existing benchmarks for reward models show a weak correlation with the performance of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Sunghwan Kim , Dongjin Kang , Taeyoon Kwon , Hyungjoo Chae , Dongha Lee , Jinyoung Yeo

Reinforcement learning from human feedback usually models preferences using a reward function that does not distinguish between people. We argue that this is unlikely to be a good design choice in contexts with high potential for…

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) aim to handle changing or partially known system dynamics. To solve them, one typically resorts to robust optimization methods. However, this significantly increases computational complexity and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-14 Esther Derman , Matthieu Geist , Shie Mannor

Finding optimal policies which maximize long term rewards of Markov Decision Processes requires the use of dynamic programming and backward induction to solve the Bellman optimality equation. However, many real-world problems require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) address the challenge of model uncertainty by optimizing the worst-case performance over an uncertainty set of MDPs. In this paper, we focus on the robust average-reward MDPs under the model-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Yue Wang , Alvaro Velasquez , George Atia , Ashley Prater-Bennette , Shaofeng Zou

We study procurement design when the buyer is uncertain about both the value of the good and the seller's cost. The buyer has a conjectured model but does not fully trust it. She first identifies mechanisms that maximize her worst-case…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-10 Debasis Mishra , Sanket Patil , Alessandro Pavan

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

Reward Models (RMs) are crucial for online alignment of language models (LMs) with human preferences. However, RM-based preference-tuning is vulnerable to reward hacking, whereby LM policies learn undesirable behaviors from flawed RMs. By…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Daniel Fein , Max Lamparth , Violet Xiang , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Nick Haber

We study the robustness of system estimation to parametric perturbations in system dynamics and initial conditions. We define the problem of sensitivity-based parametric uncertainty quantification in dynamical system estimation. The main…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-09 Ayush Pandey

Reward shaping has been applied widely to accelerate Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents' training. However, a principled way of designing effective reward shaping functions, especially for complex continuous control problems, remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Mateo Juliani , Mingxuan Li , Elias Bareinboim

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

Real-life parallel machine scheduling problems can be characterized by: (i) limited information about the exact task duration at scheduling time, and (ii) an opportunity to reschedule the remaining tasks each time a task processing is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-22 Izack Cohen , Krzysztof Postek , Shimrit Shtern

Reward design in reinforcement learning and optimal control is challenging. Preference-based alignment addresses this by enabling agents to learn rewards from ranked trajectory pairs provided by humans. However, existing methods often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Zhixian Xie , Haode Zhang , Yizhe Feng , Wanxin Jin

Decision-making under uncertainty is a fundamental problem encountered frequently and can be formulated as a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem. In the problem, the learner interacts with an environment by choosing an action at each…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-24 Jonathan Gornet , Bruno Sinopoli

We study reinforcement learning from human feedback in general Markov decision processes, where agents learn from trajectory-level preference comparisons. A central challenge in this setting is to design algorithms that select informative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Reda Ouhamma , Maryam Kamgarpour

Reward models (RMs) are at the crux of successfully using RLHF to align pretrained models to human preferences, yet there has been relatively little study that focuses on evaluation of those models. Evaluating reward models presents an…

Dynamic mechanism design studies how mechanism designers should allocate resources among agents in a time-varying environment. We consider the problem where the agents interact with the mechanism designer according to an unknown Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Shuang Qiu , Boxiang Lyu , Qinglin Meng , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang , Michael I. Jordan