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Related papers: Misalignment from Treating Means as Ends

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Understanding misalignments in human task-solving trajectories is crucial for enhancing AI models trained to closely mimic human reasoning. This study categorizes such misalignments into three types: (1) lack of functions to express intent,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Sejin Kim , Hosung Lee , Sundong Kim

Reinforcement learning (RL), a common tool in decision making, learns control policies from various experiences based on the associated cumulative return/rewards without treating them differently. Humans, on the contrary, often learn to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

Biased regularization and fine-tuning are two recent meta-learning approaches. They have been shown to be effective to tackle distributions of tasks, in which the tasks' target vectors are all close to a common meta-parameter vector.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-26 Giulia Denevi , Massimiliano Pontil , Carlo Ciliberto

We present a novel method for learning a set of disentangled reward functions that sum to the original environment reward and are constrained to be independently obtainable. We define independent obtainability in terms of value functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-06 Christopher Grimm , Satinder Singh

We study a class of constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which multiple constraint specifications are not identified before training. It is challenging to identify appropriate constraint specifications due to the undefined…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-02 Dongsheng Ding , Zhengyan Huan , Alejandro Ribeiro

Our goal is for agents to optimize the right reward function, despite how difficult it is for us to specify what that is. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) enables us to infer reward functions from demonstrations, but it usually assumes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Rohin Shah , Noah Gundotra , Pieter Abbeel , Anca D. Dragan

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to build general-purpose vision systems by training a single network to perform multiple tasks jointly. While promising, its potential is often hindered by "unbalanced optimization", where task interference…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yihang Guo , Tianyuan Yu , Liang Bai , Yanming Guo , Yirun Ruan , William Li , Weishi Zheng

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a widely used method for aligning large language models with human preferences. However, RLHF often suffers from reward model overoptimisation, in which models overfit to the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Lorenz Wolf , Robert Kirk , Mirco Musolesi

When applying reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), the reward is learned from data and, therefore, always has some error. It is common to mitigate this by regularizing the policy with KL divergence from a base model, with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Thomas Kwa , Drake Thomas , Adrià Garriga-Alonso

When we design and deploy an Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, reward functions motivates agents to achieve an objective. An incorrect or incomplete specification of the objective can result in behavior that does not align with human…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Zhaoyue Wang

Aligning large language models to human preferences is inherently multidimensional, yet most pipelines collapse heterogeneous signals into a single optimizeable objective. We seek to answer what it would take to simultaneously align a model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Yiran Shen , Yu Xia , Jonathan Chang , Prithviraj Ammanabrolu

Successfully navigating a complex environment to obtain a desired outcome is a difficult task, that up to recently was believed to be capable only by humans. This perception has been broken down over time, especially with the introduction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Joshua Hare

LLMs increasingly excel on AI benchmarks, but doing so does not guarantee validity for downstream tasks. This study contrasts LLM alignment on benchmarks, downstream tasks, and, importantly the intended impact of those tasks. We evaluate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Michael Hardy , Yunsung Kim

Existing approaches to reward inference from behavior typically assume that humans provide demonstrations according to specific models of behavior. However, humans often indicate their goals through a wide range of behaviors, from actions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Will Schwarzer , Jordan Schneider , Philip S. Thomas , Scott Niekum

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…

Learning generalizable reward functions is a core challenge in embodied intelligence. Recent work leverages contrastive vision language models (VLMs) to obtain dense, domain-agnostic rewards without human supervision. These methods adapt…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Simon Roy , Samuel Barbeau , Giovanni Beltrame , Christian Desrosiers , Nicolas Thome

The AI-alignment problem arises when there is a discrepancy between the goals that a human designer specifies to an AI learner and a potential catastrophic outcome that does not reflect what the human designer really wants. We argue that a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-10 Shai Shalev-Shwartz , Shaked Shammah , Amnon Shashua

We introduce the framework of performative reinforcement learning where the policy chosen by the learner affects the underlying reward and transition dynamics of the environment. Following the recent literature on performative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-08 Debmalya Mandal , Stelios Triantafyllou , Goran Radanovic

Prompt learning is effective for fine-tuning foundation models to improve their generalization across a variety of downstream tasks. However, the prompts that are independently optimized along a single modality path, may sacrifice the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Yuncheng Yang , Chuyan Zhang , Zuopeng Yang , Yuting Gao , Yulei Qin , Ke Li , Xing Sun , Jie Yang , Yun Gu

A well-defined reward function is crucial for successful training of an reinforcement learning (RL) agent. However, defining a suitable reward function is a notoriously challenging task, especially in complex, multi-objective environments.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Jasmina Gajcin , James McCarthy , Rahul Nair , Radu Marinescu , Elizabeth Daly , Ivana Dusparic