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Humans are spectacular reinforcement learners, constantly learning from and adjusting to experience and feedback. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily mean humans are fast learners. When tasks are challenging, learning can become…
Existing alignment methods directly use the reward model learned from user preference data to optimize an LLM policy, subject to KL regularization with respect to the base policy. This practice is suboptimal for maximizing user's utility…
Exploration is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), and its effectiveness is a deciding factor in the performance of RL algorithms, especially when facing sparse extrinsic rewards. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness…
Intelligent agents must pursue their goals in complex environments with partial information and often limited computational capacity. Reinforcement learning methods have achieved great success by creating agents that optimize engineered…
We propose an adaptive incentive mechanism that learns the optimal incentives in environments where players continuously update their strategies. Our mechanism updates incentives based on each player's externality, defined as the difference…
Reward shaping allows reinforcement learning (RL) agents to accelerate learning by receiving additional reward signals. However, these signals can be difficult to design manually, especially for complex RL tasks. We propose a simple and…
Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…
A reliable reward function is essential for reinforcement learning (RL) in image generation. Most current RL approaches depend on pre-trained preference models that output scalar rewards to approximate human preferences. However, these…
In addressing control problems such as regulation and tracking through reinforcement learning, it is often required to guarantee that the acquired policy meets essential performance and stability criteria such as a desired settling time and…
Reward models (RMs) have become essential for aligning large language models (LLMs), serving as scalable proxies for human evaluation in both training and inference. However, existing RMs struggle on knowledge-intensive and long-form tasks,…
We consider the task of Inverse Reinforcement Learning in Contextual Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In this setting, contexts, which define the reward and transition kernel, are sampled from a distribution. In addition, although the…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) suffers from sample inefficiency in sparse reward domains, and the problem is further pronounced in case of stochastic transitions. To improve the sample efficiency, reward shaping is a well-studied approach to…
We study reward-free and reward-agnostic exploration in episodic finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs), where an agent explores an unknown environment without observing external rewards. Reward-free exploration aims to enable…
Principal-agent problems arise when one party acts on behalf of another, leading to conflicts of interest. The economic literature has extensively studied principal-agent problems, and recent work has extended this to more complex scenarios…
Bayesian inference over the reward presents an ideal solution to the ill-posed nature of the inverse reinforcement learning problem. Unfortunately current methods generally do not scale well beyond the small tabular setting due to the need…
Decomposing complex tasks into a sequence of simpler subtasks can improve learning efficiency for an autonomous agent. Reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to optimize agent policies to complete subtasks, but requires well-defined…
The potential benefits of model-free reinforcement learning to real robotics systems are limited by its uninformed exploration that leads to slow convergence, lack of data-efficiency, and unnecessary interactions with the environment. To…
We study Off-Policy Evaluation (OPE) in contextual bandit settings with large action spaces. The benchmark estimators suffer from severe bias and variance tradeoffs. Parametric approaches suffer from bias due to difficulty specifying the…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents are particularly hard to train when rewards are sparse. One common solution is to use intrinsic rewards to encourage agents to explore their environment. However, recent intrinsic exploration methods often…
Reinforcement learning for embodied agents is a challenging problem. The accumulated reward to be optimized is often a very rugged function, and gradient methods are impaired by many local optimizers. We demonstrate, in an experimental…