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Random exploration is one of the main mechanisms through which reinforcement learning (RL) finds well-performing policies. However, it can lead to undesirable or catastrophic outcomes when learning online in safety-critical environments. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-15 Djordje Grbic , Sebastian Risi

Constructing a universal moral code for artificial intelligence (AI) is difficult or even impossible, given that different human cultures have different definitions of morality and different societal norms. We therefore argue that the value…

We present an ethical decision-making framework that refines a pre-trained reinforcement learning (RL) model using a task-agnostic ethical layer. Following initial training, the RL model undergoes ethical fine-tuning, where human feedback…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Rohit K. Dubey , Damian Dailisan , Sachit Mahajan

In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Grigorii Veviurko , Wendelin Böhmer , Mathijs de Weerdt

Fairness in classification tasks has traditionally focused on bias removal from neural representations, but recent trends favor algorithmic methods that embed fairness into the training process. These methods steer models towards fair…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Leon Eshuijs , Shihan Wang , Antske Fokkens

We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Nadav Merlis

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an innovative approach to financial decision making, offering specialized solutions to complex investment problems where traditional methods fail. This review analyzes 167 articles from 2017--2025, focusing on…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-12-12 Mohammad Rezoanul Hoque , Md Meftahul Ferdaus , M. Kabir Hassan

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a sub-domain of machine learning, mainly concerned with solving sequential decision-making problems by a learning agent that interacts with the decision environment to improve its behavior through the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Hossein Hassani , Ehsan Hallaji , Roozbeh Razavi-Far , Mehrdad Saif , Liang Lin

Reinforcement learning (RL) depends critically on the choice of reward functions used to capture the de- sired behavior and constraints of a robot. Usually, these are handcrafted by a expert designer and represent heuristics for relatively…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-03-03 Xiao Li , Cristian-Ioan Vasile , Calin Belta

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for robotic path planning in uncertain environments. However, the control policies trained for an RL agent crucially depend on user-defined, state-based reward functions. Poorly designed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Anand Balakrishnan , Stefan Jakšić , Edgar A. Aguilar , Dejan Ničković , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in solving relatively complex tasks, yet the deployment of RL systems in real-world scenarios poses significant challenges related to safety and robustness. This paper aims to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Taku Yamagata , Raul Santos-Rodriguez

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms find applications in inventory control, recommender systems, vehicular traffic management, cloud computing and robotics. The real-world complications of many tasks arising in these domains makes them…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-03 Sindhu Padakandla

Reinforcement learning (RL) in autonomous driving employs a trial-and-error mechanism, enhancing robustness in unpredictable environments. However, crafting effective reward functions remains challenging, as conventional approaches rely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Yongming Chen , Miner Chen , Liewen Liao , Mingyang Jiang , Xiang Zuo , Hengrui Zhang , Yuchen Xi , Songan Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the active fields in machine learning, demonstrating remarkable potential in tackling real-world challenges. Despite its promising prospects, this methodology has encountered with issues and challenges,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Alireza Rashidi Laleh , Majid Nili Ahmadabadi

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

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks typically exhibit a fundamental safety-capability tradeoff, where improving task performance degrades safety alignment even on benign datasets. This degradation persists across…

Given that there exist many different formal and precise treatments of deontologi- cal and consequentialist ethics, we turn to virtue ethics and consider what could be a formalization of virtue ethics that makes it amenable to automation.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-05-22 Naveen Sundar Govindarajulu , Selmer Bringjsord , Rikhiya Ghosh

Recent advances in behavior cloning (BC) have enabled impressive visuomotor control policies. However, these approaches are limited by the quality of human demonstrations, the manual effort required for data collection, and the diminishing…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Lars Ankile , Zhenyu Jiang , Rocky Duan , Guanya Shi , Pieter Abbeel , Anusha Nagabandi

We transform reinforcement learning (RL) into a form of supervised learning (SL) by turning traditional RL on its head, calling this Upside Down RL (UDRL). Standard RL predicts rewards, while UDRL instead uses rewards as task-defining…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Juergen Schmidhuber

We consider a problem of learning the reward and policy from expert examples under unknown dynamics. Our proposed method builds on the framework of generative adversarial networks and introduces the empowerment-regularized maximum-entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Ahmed H. Qureshi , Byron Boots , Michael C. Yip