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Distributional reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework increasingly adopted in safety-critical domains for its ability to optimize risk-sensitive objectives. However, the role of the discount factor is often overlooked, as it is…
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is well-suitedd for solving complex tasks by breaking them down into structured policies. However, HRL agents often struggle with efficient exploration and quick adaptation. To overcome these…
Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) improves the efficiency of long-horizon reinforcement-learning tasks with sparse rewards by decomposing the task into a hierarchy of subgoals. The main challenge of HRL is efficient discovery of the…
Commonly in reinforcement learning (RL), rewards are discounted over time using an exponential function to model time preference, thereby bounding the expected long-term reward. In contrast, in economics and psychology, it has been shown…
Recommending novel content, which expands user horizons by introducing them to new interests, has been shown to improve users' long-term experience on recommendation platforms \cite{chen2021values}. Users however are not constantly looking…
Many real-world applications can be formulated as multi-agent cooperation problems, such as network packet routing and coordination of autonomous vehicles. The emergence of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) provides a promising approach for…
Goal-conditioned Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is a promising approach for scaling up reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. However, it often suffers from training inefficiency as the action space of the high-level, i.e., the…
Major depressive disorder (MDD) presents challenges in diagnosis and treatment due to its complex and heterogeneous nature. Emerging evidence indicates that reward processing abnormalities may serve as a behavioral marker for MDD. To…
Reinforcement learning (RL) typically defines a discount factor as part of the Markov Decision Process. The discount factor values future rewards by an exponential scheme that leads to theoretical convergence guarantees of the Bellman…
Current Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) algorithms excel in long-horizon sequential decision-making tasks but still face two challenges: delay effects and spurious correlations. To address them, we propose a causal HRL approach…
Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) has seen widespread interest as an approach to tractable learning of complex modular behaviors. However, existing work either assume access to expert-constructed hierarchies, or use…
In the realm of human mobility, the decision-making process for selecting the next-visit location is intricately influenced by a trade-off between spatial and temporal constraints, which are reflective of individual needs and preferences.…
How do people decide how long to continue in a task, when to switch, and to which other task? Understanding the mechanisms that underpin task interleaving is a long-standing goal in the cognitive sciences. Prior work suggests greedy…
In economics and psychology, delay discounting is often used to characterize how individuals choose between a smaller immediate reward and a larger delayed reward. People with higher delay discounting rate (DDR) often choose smaller but…
Recommender Systems (RS) are fundamental to modern online services. While most existing approaches optimize for short-term engagement, recent work has begun to explore reinforcement learning (RL) to model long-term user value. However,…
Exploration and credit assignment under sparse rewards are still challenging problems. We argue that these challenges arise in part due to the intrinsic rigidity of operating at the level of actions. Actions can precisely define how to…
Deep reinforcement learning agents are often misaligned, as they over-exploit early reward signals. Recently, several symbolic approaches have addressed these challenges by encoding sparse objectives along with aligned plans. However,…
For living beings, survival depends on effective regulation of internal physiological states through motivated behaviors. In this perspective we propose that Homeostatically Regulated Reinforcement Learning (HRRL) as a framework to describe…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective at enhancing the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet underlying mechanisms driving this success remain largely opaque. Our analysis reveals that puzzling…
The aim of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is to infer an agent's preferences from observing their behaviour. Usually, preferences are modelled as a reward function, $R$, and behaviour is modelled as a policy, $\pi$. One of the central…