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The effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in continuous control robotics tasks is mainly dependent on the design of the underlying reward function, which is highly prone to reward hacking. A misalignment between the reward…

We study the problem of balancing effectiveness and efficiency in automated feature selection. After exploring many feature selection methods, we observe a computational dilemma: 1) traditional feature selection is mostly efficient, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Wei Fan , Kunpeng Liu , Hao Liu , Yong Ge , Hui Xiong , Yanjie Fu

Why do reinforcement learning (RL) policies fail or succeed? This is a challenging question due to the complex, high-dimensional nature of agent-environment interactions. In this work, we take a causal perspective on explaining the behavior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-22 Armin Kekić , Jan Schneider , Dieter Büchler , Bernhard Schölkopf , Michel Besserve

In many sequential decision making tasks, it is challenging to design reward functions that help an RL agent efficiently learn behavior that is considered good by the agent designer. A number of different formulations of the reward-design…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-25 Zeyu Zheng , Junhyuk Oh , Satinder Singh

The aim of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world applications is to create systems capable of making autonomous decisions by learning from their environment through trial and error. This paper emphasizes the importance of reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Sinan Ibrahim , Mostafa Mostafa , Ali Jnadi , Hadi Salloum , Pavel Osinenko

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-11 Niels Justesen , Sebastian Risi

In the last decade, Deep Reinforcement Learning has evolved into a powerful tool for complex sequential decision-making problems. It combines deep learning's proficiency in processing rich input signals with reinforcement learning's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Julien Roy

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Meng Cao , Lei Shu , Lei Yu , Yun Zhu , Nevan Wichers , Yinxiao Liu , Lei Meng

We propose a framework for verifiable and compositional reinforcement learning (RL) in which a collection of RL subsystems, each of which learns to accomplish a separate subtask, are composed to achieve an overall task. The framework…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-13 Cyrus Neary , Aryaman Singh Samyal , Christos Verginis , Murat Cubuktepe , Ufuk Topcu

We present CRM (Multi-Agent Collaborative Reward Model), a framework that replaces a single black-box reward model with a coordinated team of specialist evaluators to improve robustness and interpretability in RLHF. Conventional reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Pei Yang , Ke Zhang , Ji Wang , Xiao Chen , Yuxin Tang , Eric Yang , Lynn Ai , Bill Shi

Existing agents for solving tasks such as ML engineering rely on prompting powerful language models. As a result, these agents do not improve with more experience. In this paper, we show that agents backed by weaker models that improve via…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Sherry Yang , Joy He-Yueya , Percy Liang

How can we design good goals for arbitrarily intelligent agents? Reinforcement learning (RL) is a natural approach. Unfortunately, RL does not work well for generally intelligent agents, as RL agents are incentivised to shortcut the reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-05-11 Tom Everitt , Marcus Hutter

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a prevalent and effective methodology for real-world recommender systems, enabling learning policies from historical data and capturing user preferences. In offline RL, reward shaping…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Wenzheng Shu , Yanxiang Zeng , Yongxiang Tang , Teng Sha , Ning Luo , Yanhua Cheng , Xialong Liu , Fan Zhou , Peng Jiang

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) is inherently a reactive method, operating under the assumption that it starts with no prior knowledge of the system and entirely depends on trial-and-error for learning. This approach faces several…

Personalized decision systems in healthcare and behavioral support often rely on static rule-based or engagement-maximizing heuristics that overlook users' emotional context and ethical constraints. Such approaches risk recommending…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Garapati Keerthana , Manik Gupta

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have emerged as a popular choice for training an efficient and effective dialogue policy. However, these methods suffer from sparse and unstable reward signals returned by a user simulator only when a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-18 Ziming Li , Sungjin Lee , Baolin Peng , Jinchao Li , Julia Kiseleva , Maarten de Rijke , Shahin Shayandeh , Jianfeng Gao

When a person is not satisfied with how a robot performs a task, they can intervene to correct it. Reward learning methods enable the robot to adapt its reward function online based on such human input, but they rely on handcrafted…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-01-13 Andreea Bobu , Marius Wiggert , Claire Tomlin , Anca D. Dragan

With the increasing presence of robots in our every-day environments, improving their social skills is of utmost importance. Nonetheless, social robotics still faces many challenges. One bottleneck is that robotic behaviors need to be often…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-08 Anand Ballou , Xavier Alameda-Pineda , Chris Reinke

Sampling-based trajectory planners are widely used for agile autonomous driving due to their ability to generate fast, smooth, and kinodynamically feasible trajectories. However, their behavior is often governed by a cost function with…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Alexander Langmann , Yevhenii Tokarev , Mattia Piccinini , Korbinian Moller , Johannes Betz