Who established Reinforcement Learning as a distinct field with their seminal textbook?

Answer

Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto

The text explicitly names Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto as the individuals most frequently associated with establishing Reinforcement Learning (RL) as a distinct field. Their foundational contributions were synthesized in their textbook, Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, which has served as the definitive guide to the core algorithms of the field for many decades. Their work synthesized prior research, significantly focusing on methods such as temporal-difference (TD) learning, which is crucial for agents learning directly from experience without needing to wait for the end of an entire episode to update their value estimates. Their foundational importance was later recognized when they received the A.M. Turing Award in 2023 for their work on reward-based machine learning.

Related Questions

Who established Reinforcement Learning as a distinct field with their seminal textbook?What function does the Reward Model (RM) serve in the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) process?What specific level did EACL 2006 research focus RL on for learning optimal dialogue strategies?What essential concept must an RL agent learn to maximize over a sequence of interactions?What major award did Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto receive in 2023?Why is Temporal-Difference (TD) learning considered significant in RL research?Regarding LLM dialogue agents, what characteristic defines their action space?Which reinforcement learning algorithm is typically utilized during the RL Fine-Tuning stage of RLHF?How does the objective learned via RL in dialogue differ from supervised learning next-token prediction?To what mathematical concept pioneered by Richard Bellman does RL owe its structural foundation for sequential decisions?

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