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In reinforcement learning the Q-values summarize the expected future rewards that the agent will attain. However, they cannot capture the epistemic uncertainty about those rewards. In this work we derive a new Bellman operator with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-07 Brendan O'Donoghue

An efficient policy search algorithm should estimate the local gradient of the objective function, with respect to the policy parameters, from as few trials as possible. Whereas most policy search methods estimate this gradient by observing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-06-18 Gregory Lawrence , Stuart Russell

Latent learning, classically theorized by Tolman, shows that biological agents (e.g., rats) can acquire internal representations of their environment without rewards, enabling rapid adaptation once rewards are introduced. In contrast, from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jian Xiong , Jingbo Zhou , Zihan Zhou , Yixiong Xiao , Le Zhang , Jingyong Ye , Rui Qian , Yang Zhou , Dejing Dou

The problem of Learning from Demonstration is targeted at learning to perform tasks based on observed examples. One approach to Learning from Demonstration is Inverse Reinforcement Learning, in which actions are observed to infer rewards.…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2016-08-11 Karan K. Budhraja , Tim Oates

Humans use social context to specify preferences over behaviors, i.e. their reward functions. Yet, algorithms for inferring reward models from preference data do not take this social learning view into account. Inspired by pragmatic human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Andi Peng , Yuying Sun , Tianmin Shu , David Abel

In offline reinforcement learning, weighted regression is a common method to ensure the learned policy stays close to the behavior policy and to prevent selecting out-of-sample actions. In this work, we show that due to the limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Huayu Chen , Cheng Lu , Chengyang Ying , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

Positive affect has been linked to increased interest, curiosity and satisfaction in human learning. In reinforcement learning, extrinsic rewards are often sparse and difficult to define, intrinsically motivated learning can help address…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Dean Zadok , Daniel McDuff , Ashish Kapoor

This study raises and addresses the problem of time-delayed feedback in learning in games. Because learning in games assumes that multiple agents independently learn their strategies, a discrepancy in optimization often emerges among the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Yuma Fujimoto , Kenshi Abe , Kaito Ariu

Reinforcement learning methods require careful design involving a reward function to obtain the desired action policy for a given task. In the absence of hand-crafted reward functions, prior work on the topic has proposed several methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-16 Daiki Kimura , Subhajit Chaudhury , Ryuki Tachibana , Sakyasingha Dasgupta

We address the problem of learning hierarchical deep neural network policies for reinforcement learning. In contrast to methods that explicitly restrict or cripple lower layers of a hierarchy to force them to use higher-level modulating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-05 Tuomas Haarnoja , Kristian Hartikainen , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

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

In reinforcement learning, two objective functions have been developed extensively in the literature: discounted and averaged rewards. The generalization to an entropy-regularized setting has led to improved robustness and exploration for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-20 Jacob Adamczyk , Volodymyr Makarenko , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

Recent efforts to learn reward functions from human feedback have tended to use deep neural networks, whose lack of transparency hampers our ability to explain agent behaviour or verify alignment. We explore the merits of learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Tom Bewley , Jonathan Lawry , Arthur Richards , Rachel Craddock , Ian Henderson

We consider the approximation of functions by 2-layer neural networks with a small number of hidden weights based on the squared loss and small datasets. Due to the highly non-convex energy landscape, gradient-based training often suffers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Johannes Hertrich , Sebastian Neumayer

Reinforcement learning involves agents interacting with an environment to complete tasks. When rewards provided by the environment are sparse, agents may not receive immediate feedback on the quality of actions that they take, thereby…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Baicen Xiao , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Radha Poovendran

In aligning large language models (LLMs), reward models have played an important role, but are standardly trained as discriminative models and rely only on labeled human preference data. In this paper, we explore methods that train reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Chenglong Wang , Yang Gan , Yifu Huo , Yongyu Mu , Qiaozhi He , Murun Yang , Bei Li , Tong Xiao , Chunliang Zhang , Tongran Liu , Jingbo Zhu

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have exhibited great potential in solving single-task sequential decision-making problems with high-dimensional observations and long horizons, but are known to be hard to generalize across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Boyuan Chen , Chuning Zhu , Pulkit Agrawal , Kaiqing Zhang , Abhishek Gupta

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) scales the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) but remains bottlenecked by limited labeled samples for continued data scaling. Reinforcement learning with intrinsic rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Chuyi Tan , Peiwen Yuan , Xinglin Wang , Yiwei Li , Shaoxiong Feng , Yueqi Zhang , Jiayi Shi , Ji Zhang , Boyuan Pan , Yao Hu , Kan Li

Static feature exclusion strategies often fail to prevent bias when hidden dependencies influence the model predictions. To address this issue, we explore a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that integrates bias mitigation and automated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sudip Khadka , L. S. Paudel

Large language models can predict real-valued quantities from heterogeneous inputs such as text, code, and molecular strings, but most training objectives score each decoded floating-point number independently, improving point estimates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Jungsoo Park , Hyungjoo Chae , Ethan Mendes , Jay DeYoung , Varsha Kishore , Wei Xu , Alan Ritter