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We study episodic reinforcement learning under unknown adversarial corruptions in both the rewards and the transition probabilities of the underlying system. We propose new algorithms which, compared to the existing results in (Lykouris et…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Yifang Chen , Simon S. Du , Kevin Jamieson

The effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in continuous control robotics tasks is mainly dependent on the design of the underlying reward function, which is highly prone to reward hacking. A misalignment between the reward…

This paper aims to establish an entropy-regularized value-based reinforcement learning method that can ensure the monotonic improvement of policies at each policy update. Unlike previously proposed lower-bounds on policy improvement in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-26 Lingwei Zhu , Takamitsu Matsubara

We consider undiscounted reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes (MDPs) where both the reward functions and the state-transition probabilities may vary (gradually or abruptly) over time. For this problem setting, we propose an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-11 Pratik Gajane , Ronald Ortner , Peter Auer

Reinforcement learning is about learning agent models that make the best sequential decisions in unknown environments. In an unknown environment, the agent needs to explore the environment while exploiting the collected information, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Hong Qian , Yang Yu

Inverse reinforcement learning is the problem of inferring a reward function from an optimal policy or demonstrations by an expert. In this work, it is assumed that the reward is expressed as a reward machine whose transitions depend on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Mohamad Louai Shehab , Antoine Aspeel , Necmiye Ozay

We initiate the study of fairness in reinforcement learning, where the actions of a learning algorithm may affect its environment and future rewards. Our fairness constraint requires that an algorithm never prefers one action over another…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-08 Shahin Jabbari , Matthew Joseph , Michael Kearns , Jamie Morgenstern , Aaron Roth

The performance of reinforcement learning depends upon designing an appropriate action space, where the effect of each action is measurable, yet, granular enough to permit flexible behavior. So far, this process involved non-trivial user…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Edoardo Cetin , Oya Celiktutan

Inferring a person's goal from their behavior is an important problem in applications of AI (e.g. automated assistants, recommender systems). The workhorse model for this task is the rational actor model - this amounts to assuming that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-15 Alexander Peysakhovich

Deep reinforcement learning has enabled robots to learn motor skills from environmental interactions with minimal to no prior knowledge. However, existing reinforcement learning algorithms assume an episodic setting, in which the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-27 Jigang Kim , J. hyeon Park , Daesol Cho , H. Jin Kim

These lecture notes give a statistical perspective on the foundations of reinforcement learning and interactive decision making. We present a unifying framework for addressing the exploration-exploitation dilemma using frequentist and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-29 Dylan J. Foster , Alexander Rakhlin

Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) methods can successfully solve a wide range of sequential decision problems. However, learning policies that can generalize predictably across multiple tasks in a setting with non-Markovian reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Guillermo Infante , David Kuric , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez , Herke van Hoof

Fairness-aware learning studies the development of algorithms that avoid discriminatory decision outcomes despite biased training data. While most studies have concentrated on immediate bias in static contexts, this paper highlights the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Jacob Lear , Lu Zhang

Markov decision processes (MDPs) are used to model a wide variety of applications ranging from game playing over robotics to finance. Their optimal policy typically maximizes the expected sum of rewards given at each step of the decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Maximilian Nägele , Jan Olle , Thomas Fösel , Remmy Zen , Florian Marquardt

The central challenge of reinforcement learning for reasoning lies not only in the sparsity of outcome-level supervision, but more fundamentally in how to transform feedback provided only at the end of a sequence into fine-grained learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Fei Ding , Yongkang Zhang , Runhao Liu , Yuhao Liao , Zijian Zeng , Sibo wang , Huiming Yang

Deep reinforcement learning enables algorithms to learn complex behavior, deal with continuous action spaces and find good strategies in environments with high dimensional state spaces. With deep reinforcement learning being an active area…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-17 Winfried Lötzsch

The optimal objective is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how policies are evaluated and optimized. While total return maximization is the ideal objective in RL, discounted return maximization is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Shuyu Yin , Fei Wen , Peilin Liu , Tao Luo

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 this paper, we confront the problem of applying reinforcement learning to agents that perceive the environment through many sensors and that can perform parallel actions using many actuators as is the case in complex autonomous robots.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-07-04 E. Celaya , J. M. Porta

The stability-plasticity dilemma is a major challenge in continual learning, as it involves balancing the conflicting objectives of maintaining performance on previous tasks while learning new tasks. In this paper, we propose the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Haneol Kang , Dong-Wan Choi