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Related papers: Misalignment from Treating Means as Ends

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It is often difficult to hand-specify what the correct reward function is for a task, so researchers have instead aimed to learn reward functions from human behavior or feedback. The types of behavior interpreted as evidence of the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-14 Hong Jun Jeon , Smitha Milli , Anca D. Dragan

Big models, exemplified by Large Language Models (LLMs), are models typically pre-trained on massive data and comprised of enormous parameters, which not only obtain significantly improved performance across diverse tasks but also present…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Jing Yao , Xiaoyuan Yi , Xiting Wang , Jindong Wang , Xing Xie

The overarching goal of this work is to efficiently enable end-users to correctly anticipate a robot's behavior in novel situations. Since a robot's behavior is often a direct result of its underlying objective function, our insight is that…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-10-19 Sandy H. Huang , David Held , Pieter Abbeel , Anca D. Dragan

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning under safety requirements, in which an agent is trained to complete a given task, typically formalized as the maximization of a reward signal over time, while concurrently avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Tu-Hoa Pham , Giovanni De Magistris , Don Joven Agravante , Subhajit Chaudhury , Asim Munawar , Ryuki Tachibana

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach for solving various control, optimization, and sequential decision making tasks. However, designing reward functions for complex tasks (e.g., with multiple objectives and safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-23 Xuan Zhao , Marcos Campos

The success of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) critically depends on the quality of the reward model. However, while this quality is primarily evaluated through accuracy, it remains unclear whether accuracy fully captures…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Noam Razin , Zixuan Wang , Hubert Strauss , Stanley Wei , Jason D. Lee , Sanjeev Arora

In reinforcement learning, the goal is to seek rewards and avoid punishments. A simple scalar captures the value of a state or of taking an action, where expected future rewards increase and punishments decrease this quantity. Naturally an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-02-19 Patrick C. Connor , Thomas P. Trappenberg

Developers often struggle to specify correct training labels and rewards. Perhaps they don't need to. We propose recontextualization, which reduces how often language models "game" training signals, performing misbehaviors those signals…

Discounted reinforcement learning is fundamentally incompatible with function approximation for control in continuing tasks. It is not an optimization problem in its usual formulation, so when using function approximation there is no…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-28 Abhishek Naik , Roshan Shariff , Niko Yasui , Hengshuai Yao , Richard S. Sutton

Performance evaluations are critical for quantifying algorithmic advances in reinforcement learning. Recent reproducibility analyses have shown that reported performance results are often inconsistent and difficult to replicate. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-14 Scott M. Jordan , Yash Chandak , Daniel Cohen , Mengxue Zhang , Philip S. Thomas

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems can be complex and non-interpretable, making it challenging for non-AI experts to understand or intervene in their decisions. This is due in part to the sequential nature of RL in which actions are chosen…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Amal Alabdulkarim , Madhuri Singh , Gennie Mansi , Kaely Hall , Upol Ehsan , Mark O. Riedl

Humans can often quickly and efficiently solve complex new learning tasks given only a small set of examples. In contrast, modern artificially intelligent systems often require thousands or millions of observations in order to solve even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-08 Christian Raymond

Compositional generalization refers to correctly interpret novel combinations of known primitives, which remains a major challenge. Existing approaches often rely on supervised fine-tuning, which encourages models to imitate target outputs.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xiyan Fu , Wei Liu

While reinforcement learning provides an appealing formalism for learning individual skills, a general-purpose robotic system must be able to master an extensive repertoire of behaviors. Instead of learning a large collection of skills…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-10-28 Ashvin Nair , Shikhar Bahl , Alexander Khazatsky , Vitchyr Pong , Glen Berseth , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has enabled significant advancements within language modeling for powerful, instruction-following models. However, the alignment of these models remains a pressing challenge as the policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Ahmed M. Ahmed , Rafael Rafailov , Stepan Sharkov , Xuechen Li , Sanmi Koyejo

No real-world reward function is perfect. Sensory errors and software bugs may result in RL agents observing higher (or lower) rewards than they should. For example, a reinforcement learning agent may prefer states where a sensory error…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-08-22 Tom Everitt , Victoria Krakovna , Laurent Orseau , Marcus Hutter , Shane Legg

Mixed incentives among a population with multiagent teams has been shown to have advantages over a fully cooperative system; however, discovering the best mixture of incentives or team structure is a difficult and dynamic problem. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-04-18 David Radke , Kyle Tilbury

In real-world environments, autonomous agents rely on their egocentric observations. They must learn adaptive strategies to interact with others who possess mixed motivations, discernible only through visible cues. Several Multi-Agent…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Violet Xiang , Logan Cross , Jan-Philipp Fränken , Nick Haber

Recent advances in aligning Large Language Models with human preferences have benefited from larger reward models and better preference data. However, most of these methodologies rely on the accuracy of the reward model. The reward models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Debangshu Banerjee , Aditya Gopalan