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For most reinforcement learning approaches, the learning is performed by maximizing an accumulative reward that is expectedly and manually defined for specific tasks. However, in real world, rewards are emergent phenomena from the complex…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-05-23 Min Xu

Reward functions are central in specifying the task we want a reinforcement learning agent to perform. Given a task and desired optimal behavior, we study the problem of designing informative reward functions so that the designed rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Rati Devidze , Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Adish Singla

We study deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with delayed rewards. In many real-world tasks, instant rewards are often not readily accessible or even defined immediately after the agent performs actions. In this work, we first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Beining Han , Zhizhou Ren , Zuofan Wu , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng

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 the traditional view of reinforcement learning, the agent's goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes its expected sum of rewards. Once the agent finds this policy, the learning ends. This view contrasts with \emph{continual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Esraa Elelimy , David Szepesvari , Martha White , Michael Bowling

State-of-the-art model-based reinforcement learning methods train policies on imagined rollouts. These rollouts are trajectories generated by a learned dynamics model and are scored by a learned reward model, but without querying the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Nadav Timor , Ravid Shwartz-Ziv , Micah Goldblum , Yann LeCun , David Harel

It is often very challenging to manually design reward functions for complex, real-world tasks. To solve this, one can instead use reward learning to infer a reward function from data. However, there are often multiple reward functions that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-08 Joar Skalse , Matthew Farrugia-Roberts , Stuart Russell , Alessandro Abate , Adam Gleave

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Xinran Liang , Katherine Shu , Kimin Lee , Pieter Abbeel

In toxicology research, experiments are often conducted to determine the effect of toxicant exposure on the behavior of mice, where mice are randomized to receive the toxicant or not. In particular, in fixed interval experiments, one…

This paper proposes a new reinforcement learning with hyperbolic discounting. Combining a new temporal difference error with the hyperbolic discounting in recursive manner and reward-punishment framework, a new scheme to learn the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Taisuke Kobayashi

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework which is suitable for both the batch RL setting and the setting where there are many reward functions of interest. During the exploration phase, an agent collects samples without using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ruosong Wang , Simon S. Du , Lin F. Yang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

In environments with sparse or delayed rewards, reinforcement learning (RL) incurs high sample complexity due to the large number of interactions needed for learning. This limitation has motivated the use of large language models (LLMs) for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Narjes Nourzad , Carlee Joe-Wong

The concept of the value-gradient is introduced and developed in the context of reinforcement learning. It is shown that by learning the value-gradients exploration or stochastic behaviour is no longer needed to find locally optimal…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2008-03-26 Michael Fairbank

Reinforcement learning (RL) has drawn increasing interests in recent years due to its tremendous success in various applications. However, standard RL algorithms can only be applied for single reward function, and cannot adapt to an unseen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Ziyang Tang , Yihao Feng , Qiang Liu

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

An agent's ability to leverage past experience is critical for efficiently solving new tasks. Approximate solutions for new tasks can be obtained from previously derived value functions, as demonstrated by research on transfer learning,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Jacob Adamczyk , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul Kulkarni

Recent work has shown that deep reinforcement-learning agents can learn to follow language-like instructions from infrequent environment rewards. However, this places on environment designers the onus of designing language-conditional…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-12-24 Dzmitry Bahdanau , Felix Hill , Jan Leike , Edward Hughes , Arian Hosseini , Pushmeet Kohli , Edward Grefenstette

The behavior decision-making subsystem is a key component of the autonomous driving system, which reflects the decision-making ability of the vehicle and the driver, and is an important symbol of the high-level intelligence of the vehicle.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Zixiang Wang , Hao Yan , Changsong Wei , Junyu Wang , Minheng Xiao

Learning a near optimal policy in a partially observable system remains an elusive challenge in contemporary reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider episodic reinforcement learning in a reward-mixing Markov decision process (MDP).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Jeongyeol Kwon , Yonathan Efroni , Constantine Caramanis , Shie Mannor

The reinforcement learning paradigm allows, in principle, for complex behaviours to be learned directly from simple reward signals. In practice, however, it is common to carefully hand-design the reward function to encourage a particular…