The major application areas of reinforcement learning (RL) have traditionally been game playing and continuous control. In recent years, however, RL has been increasingly applied in systems that interact with humans. RL can personalize digital systems to make them more relevant to individual users. Challenges in personalization settings may be different from challenges found in traditional application areas of RL. An overview of work that uses RL for personalization, however, is lacking. In this work, we introduce a framework of personalization settings and use it in a systematic literature review. Besides setting, we review solutions and evaluation strategies. Results show that RL has been increasingly applied to personalization problems and realistic evaluations have become more prevalent. RL has become sufficiently robust to apply in contexts that involve humans and the field as a whole is growing. However, it seems not to be maturing: the ratios of studies that include a comparison or a realistic evaluation are not showing upward trends and the vast majority of algorithms are used only once. This review can be used to find related work across domains, provides insights into the state of the field and identifies opportunities for future work.

Language systems have been of great interest to the research community and have recently reached the mass market through various assistant platforms on the web. Reinforcement Learning methods that optimize dialogue policies have seen successes in past years and have recently been extended into methods that personalize the dialogue, e.g. take the personal context of users into account. These works, however, are limited to personalization to a single user with whom they require multiple interactions and do not generalize the usage of context across users. This work introduces a problem where a generalized usage of context is relevant and proposes two Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based approaches to this problem. The first approach uses a single learner and extends the traditional POMDP formulation of dialogue state with features that describe the user context. The second approach segments users by context and then employs a learner per context. We compare these approaches in a benchmark of existing non-RL and RL-based methods in three established and one novel application domain of financial product recommendation. We compare the influence of context and training experiences on performance and find that learning approaches generally outperform a handcrafted gold standard.

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Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has shown remarkable success in artificial domains and in some real-world applications. However, substantial challenges remain such as learning efficiently under safety constraints. Adherence to safety constraints is a hard requirement in many high-impact application domains such as healthcare and finance. These constraints are preferably represented symbolically to ensure clear semantics at a suitable level of abstraction. Existing approaches to safe DRL assume that being unsafe leads to low rewards. We show that this is a special case of symbolically constrained RL and analyze a generic setting in which total reward and being safe may or may not be correlated. We analyze the impact of symbolic constraints and identify a connection between expected future reward and distance towards a goal in an automaton representation of the constraints. We use this connection in an algorithm for learning complex behaviors safely and efficiently. This algorithm relies on symbolic reasoning over safety constraints to improve the efficiency of a subsymbolic learner with a symbolically obtained measure of progress. We measure sample efficiency on a grid world and a conversational product recommender with real-world constraints. The so-called Planning for Potential algorithm converges quickly and significantly outperforms all baselines. Specifically, we find that symbolic reasoning is necessary for safety during and after learning and can be effectively used to guide a neural learner towards promising areas of the solution space. We conclude that RL can be applied both safely and efficiently when combined with symbolic reasoning.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for learning complex behaviors, but lacks adoption in many settings due to sample size requirements. We introduce a framework for increasing sample efficiency of RL algorithms. Our approach focuses on optimizing environment rewards with high-level instructions. These are modeled as a high-level controller over temporally extended actions known as options. These options can be looped, interleaved and partially ordered with a rich language for high-level instructions. Crucially, the instructions may be underspecified in the sense that following them does not guarantee high reward in the environment. We present an algorithm for control with these so-called option machines (OMs), discuss option selection for the partially ordered case and describe an algorithm for learning with OMs. We compare our approach in zero-shot, single- and multi-task settings in an environment with fully specified and underspecified instructions. We find that OMs perform significantly better than or comparable to the state-of-art in all environments and learning settings.

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