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As humans, our goals and our environment are persistently changing throughout our lifetime based on our experiences, actions, and internal and external drives. In contrast, typical reinforcement learning problem set-ups consider decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Annie Xie , James Harrison , Chelsea Finn

Causal representation learning (CRL) offers the promise of uncovering the underlying causal model by which observed data was generated, but the practical applicability of existing methods remains limited by the strong assumptions required…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Yuhang Liu , Zhen Zhang , Dong Gong , Erdun Gao , Biwei Huang , Mingming Gong , Anton van den Hengel , Kun Zhang , Javen Qinfeng Shi

Recently, there has been increasing interest in transparency and interpretability in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) systems. Verbal explanations, as the most natural way of communication in our daily life, deserve more attention, since…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-12-25 Xinzhi Wang , Huao Li , Hui Zhang , Michael Lewis , Katia Sycara

The success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the ability to learn robust representations from the observations of the environment. In most cases, the representations learned purely by the reinforcement learning loss can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Somjit Nath , Rushiv Arora , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Explainability plays an increasingly important role in machine learning. Furthermore, humans view the world through a causal lens and thus prefer causal explanations over associational ones. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a causal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Xiaoxiao Wang , Fanyu Meng , Xin Liu , Zhaodan Kong , Xin Chen

Inferring the abstract relational and causal structure of the world is a major challenge for reinforcement-learning (RL) agents. For humans, language--particularly in the form of explanations--plays a considerable role in overcoming this…

The aim of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is to infer a reward function $R$ from a policy $\pi$. To do this, we need a model of how $\pi$ relates to $R$. In the current literature, the most common models are optimality, Boltzmann…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-27 Joar Skalse , Alessandro Abate

Causal dynamics learning has recently emerged as a promising approach to enhancing robustness in reinforcement learning (RL). Typically, the goal is to build a dynamics model that makes predictions based on the causal relationships among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Inwoo Hwang , Yunhyeok Kwak , Suhyung Choi , Byoung-Tak Zhang , Sanghack Lee

Single-task RL agents are typically trained under a fixed reward function, which limits their robustness to reward misspecification and their ability to adapt to changing preferences. We introduce Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan , Pieter Abbeel

Many sequential decision-making problems that are currently automated, such as those in manufacturing or recommender systems, operate in an environment where there is either little uncertainty, or zero risk of catastrophe. As companies and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Marc Rigter

We study a class of reinforcement learning problems where the reward signals for policy learning are generated by an internal reward model that is dependent on and jointly optimized with the policy. This interdependence between the policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Mengdi Li , Xufeng Zhao , Jae Hee Lee , Cornelius Weber , Stefan Wermter

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms struggle with learning optimal policies for tasks where reward feedback is sparse and depends on a complex sequence of events in the environment. Probabilistic reward machines (PRMs) are finite-state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jan Corazza , Hadi Partovi Aria , Daniel Neider , Zhe Xu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in a wide range of sequential decision-making problems. Recent diffusion-based policies further improve RL by modeling complex, high-dimensional action distributions. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Xiaofeng Xiao , Xiao Hu , Yang Ye , Xubo Yue

Why does a phenomenon occur? Addressing this question is central to most scientific inquiries and often relies on simulations of scientific models. As models become more intricate, deciphering the causes behind phenomena in high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-04 Armin Kekić , Bernhard Schölkopf , Michel Besserve

Transformers trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL) with outcome-based supervision can spontaneously develop the ability to generate intermediate reasoning steps (Chain-of-Thought). Yet the mechanism by which sparse rewards drive policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yuval Ran-Milo , Yotam Alexander , Shahar Mendel , Nadav Cohen

In this article, we aim to provide a literature review of different formulations and approaches to continual reinforcement learning (RL), also known as lifelong or non-stationary RL. We begin by discussing our perspective on why RL is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Khimya Khetarpal , Matthew Riemer , Irina Rish , Doina Precup

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to infer an agent's preferences (represented as a reward function $R$) from their behaviour (represented as a policy $\pi$). To do this, we need a behavioural model of how $\pi$ relates to $R$. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Joar Skalse , Alessandro Abate

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been shown to be capable of learning intelligent behavior in rich domains. However, this has largely been done in simulated domains without adequate focus on the process of building the simulator. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-24 Aditya Modi , Nan Jiang , Ambuj Tewari , Satinder Singh

Reinforcement learning algorithms have had tremendous successes in online learning settings. However, these successes have relied on low-stakes interactions between the algorithmic agent and its environment. In many settings where RL could…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-05 James Bannon , Brad Windsor , Wenbo Song , Tao Li

Global explanations of a reinforcement learning (RL) agent's expected behavior can make it safer to deploy. However, such explanations are often difficult to understand because of the complicated nature of many RL policies. Effective human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Sanjana Narayanan , Isaac Lage , Finale Doshi-Velez