In reinforcement learning, what is the primary goal?

In reinforcement learning, the primary goal is to make informed decisions based on rewards. This process involves an agent interacting with an environment and learning to optimize its actions in order to maximize cumulative rewards over time.

In reinforcement learning, the agent receives feedback in the form of rewards or penalties based on its actions. The agent's objective is to learn a policy—an optimal mapping from states of the environment to actions—that maximizes the total expected reward. Unlike supervised learning, where the focus is on predicting an outcome based on labeled data, reinforcement learning emphasizes the importance of exploration and exploitation, where the agent must decide whether to try new actions or to exploit known information to gain higher rewards.

The other options focus on different types of learning paradigms or objectives that do not align with the core principles of reinforcement learning. For instance, classifying items into categories pertains to supervised learning, understanding relationships within datasets is associated with unsupervised learning, and predicting discrete outcomes generally involves regression or classification tasks rather than the reward-based approach intrinsic to reinforcement learning.