Sheila McIlraith was awarded the 2023 International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization (IJCAI) and Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) Best Paper Prize alongside three co-authors for their paper Reward machines: Exploiting reward function structure in reinforcement learning. The paper considers how the structure of an explicitly described reward function can be exploited to support efficient learning—an important setting that has so far been under explored.
The IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize is awarded annually to an outstanding paper published in JAIR in the preceding five calendar years and is based on both the significant of the paper and the quality of the presentation. It is one of the most prestigious awards for a single publication in the field of AI.