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On the Expressivity of Markov Reward

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arxiv 2111.00876 v2 pith:5I2EVWQP submitted 2021-11-01 cs.LG cs.AI

classification cs.LGcs.AI
keywords rewardfunctionmarkovtasksagentbehaviorscaptureexpressivity
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Reward is the driving force for reinforcement-learning agents. This paper is dedicated to understanding the expressivity of reward as a way to capture tasks that we would want an agent to perform. We frame this study around three new abstract notions of "task" that might be desirable: (1) a set of acceptable behaviors, (2) a partial ordering over behaviors, or (3) a partial ordering over trajectories. Our main results prove that while reward can express many of these tasks, there exist instances of each task type that no Markov reward function can capture. We then provide a set of polynomial-time algorithms that construct a Markov reward function that allows an agent to optimize tasks of each of these three types, and correctly determine when no such reward function exists. We conclude with an empirical study that corroborates and illustrates our theoretical findings.

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Cited by 1 Pith paper

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. UBP2: Uncertainty-Balanced Preference Planning for Efficient Preference-based Reinforcement Learning

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    UBP2 uses ensembles of reward, dynamics, and value models to score trajectories on a unified objective of reward plus uncertainty, yielding sublinear regret bounds and higher sample efficiency on Meta-World than prior...

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