Papers › A Practical Guide to Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning and Planning

A Practical Guide to Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning and Planning

17 Mar 2021arXiv:2103.09568archive 2025-07-28

Conor F. Hayes, Roxana Rădulescu, Eugenio Bargiacchi, Johan Källström, Matthew Macfarlane, Mathieu Reymond, Timothy Verstraeten, Luisa M. Zintgraf, Richard Dazeley, Fredrik Heintz, Enda Howley, Athirai A. Irissappane, Patrick Mannion, Ann Nowé, Gabriel Ramos, Marcello Restelli, Peter Vamplew, Diederik M. Roijers

Real-world decision-making tasks are generally complex, requiring trade-offs between multiple, often conflicting, objectives. Despite this, the majority of research in reinforcement learning and decision-theoretic planning either assumes only a single objective, or that multiple objectives can be adequately handled via a simple linear combination. Such approaches may oversimplify the underlying problem and hence produce suboptimal results. This paper serves as a guide to the application of multi-objective methods to difficult problems, and is aimed at researchers who are already familiar with single-objective reinforcement learning and planning methods who wish to adopt a multi-objective perspective on their research, as well as practitioners who encounter multi-objective decision problems in practice. It identifies the factors that may influence the nature of the desired solution, and illustrates by example how these influence the design of multi-objective decision-making systems for complex problems.

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Decision MakingMulti-Objective Reinforcement LearningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)reinforcement-learning

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