arXiv research

New reward function improves GAIL performance in task-based environments.

Many reinforcement-learning researchers treat the reward function as a part of the environment, meaning that the agent can only know the reward of a state if it encounters that state in a trial run. However, we argue that this is an unnecessary limitation and instead, the reward function should be provided to the learn…

This work characterizes reward function partial identifiability and its impact on policy optimization.

New concept: reward hacking, where optimizing a flawed reward function can hurt performance.

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 with respect to obtaining one learned reward while pursuing another learned reward…

Enhances reward specification in RL with a novel language-based approach.

EPIC quantifies reward differences without policy optimization.

New algorithm for reward-free RL with linear function approximation, reducing sample complexity.

New lower bounds for combinatorial multi-armed bandits for general reward functions.

Designers of AI agents often iterate on the reward function in a trial-and-error process until they get the desired behavior, but this only guarantees good behavior in the training environment. We propose structuring this process as a series of queries asking the user to compare between different reward functions. Thus…

PQR estimates reward functions from actions and states without assuming state-only rewards.

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 problem, or close variants thereof, have been proposed in the literature. In this…

Paper proposes operator deep Q-learning for quick reward adaptation.

One obstacle to applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems is the lack of suitable reward functions. Designing such reward functions is difficult in part because the user only has an implicit understanding of the task objective. This gives rise to the agent alignment problem: how do we create age…

In this paper, we introduce a novel combined reward cum penalty loss function to handle the regression problem. The proposed combined reward cum penalty loss function penalizes the data points which lie outside the $ε$-tube of the regressor and also assigns reward for the data points which lie inside of the $ε$-tube of…

Reward hacking exploits misspecified rewards, affecting agent capabilities and true performance.

Paper proposes RRD to learn proxy rewards for sparse delayed rewards in episodic reinforcement learning.

New algorithm finds optimal policies without knowing reward functions.

Reward collapse occurs when ranking-based reward models yield uniform rewards for different prompts.

AIRL learns robust, generalizable reward functions from demonstrations.

New RL method explores environments without rewards, achieving efficient policy generation.

This paper introduces a new reward shaping method for average-reward reinforcement learning.

Learning reward functions can lead to poor policy performance despite low error.

Fine-tunes diffusion models to generate diverse samples with high genuine rewards.

New algorithms for generalized linear bandits with unknown reward functions.

Unified framework for estimating reward functions in competitive games.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved tremendous success as a general framework for learning how to make decisions. However, this success relies on the interactive hand-tuning of a reward function by RL experts. On the other hand, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to learn a reward function from readily-obt…

Paper introduces a novel reward function for noisy financial markets using imitation learning.

Reward tweaking optimizes behavior for long-term goals by adjusting the reward function.

Study non-linear combinatorial bandits with polynomial rewards, finding significant differences from linear cases.

Bayesian REX learns Atari games from demonstrations efficiently.

Improves imitation learning in RL by learning reward function efficiently.

A new framework isolates exploration challenges in RL without explicit rewards.

To solve complex real-world problems with reinforcement learning, we cannot rely on manually specified reward functions. Instead, we can have humans communicate an objective to the agent directly. In this work, we combine two approaches to learning from human feedback: expert demonstrations and trajectory preferences. …

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot learn at all. Similarly, if the agent receives also rewards that create suboptimal m…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents require the specification of a reward signal for learning behaviours. However, introduction of corrupt or stochastic rewards can yield high variance in learning. Such corruption may be a direct result of goal misspecification, randomness in the reward signal, or correlation of the rew…

Imitation Learning describes the problem of recovering an expert policy from demonstrations. While inverse reinforcement learning approaches are known to be very sample-efficient in terms of expert demonstrations, they usually require problem-dependent reward functions or a (task-)specific reward-function regularizatio…

Reinforcement learning is a promising framework for solving control problems, but its use in practical situations is hampered by the fact that reward functions are often difficult to engineer. Specifying goals and tasks for autonomous machines, such as robots, is a significant challenge: conventionally, reward function…

A significant challenge for the practical application of reinforcement learning in the real world is the need to specify an oracle reward function that correctly defines a task. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to avoid this challenge by instead inferring a reward function from expert behavior. While appealin…

This thesis tackles learning reward functions from human comparative feedback.

Maximizes Rényi entropy for efficient exploration in reward-free RL.

New IRL algorithm identifies optimal reward and policy from expert demonstrations.

OP-GFNs sample candidates in order-preserving proportion to a learned reward function.

Learning robust value functions given raw observations and rewards is now possible with model-free and model-based deep reinforcement learning algorithms. There is a third alternative, called Successor Representations (SR), which decomposes the value function into two components -- a reward predictor and a successor ma…

New method optimizes policies without assuming known link functions between preferences and rewards.

Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) methods are ideal for safe imitation learning, as they allow a learning agent to reason about reward uncertainty and the safety of a learned policy. However, Bayesian IRL is computationally intractable for high-dimensional problems because each sample from the posterior req…

Text generation is a crucial task in NLP. Recently, several adversarial generative models have been proposed to improve the exposure bias problem in text generation. Though these models gain great success, they still suffer from the problems of reward sparsity and mode collapse. In order to address these two problems, …

The paper tackles reward-relevance in offline RL with sparse decision dynamics.