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While deep reinforcement learning has achieved tremendous successes in various applications, most existing works only focus on maximizing the expected value of total return and thus ignore its inherent stochasticity. Such stochasticity is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Han Zhong , Xun Deng , Ethan X. Fang , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Runze Li

Bayesian inference over the reward presents an ideal solution to the ill-posed nature of the inverse reinforcement learning problem. Unfortunately current methods generally do not scale well beyond the small tabular setting due to the need…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-15 Alex J. Chan , Mihaela van der Schaar

We study multi-objective reinforcement learning with nonlinear preferences over trajectories. That is, we maximize the expected value of a nonlinear function over accumulated rewards (expected scalarized return or ESR) in a multi-objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Nianli Peng , Muhang Tian , Brandon Fain

Most of reinforcement learning algorithms optimize the discounted criterion which is beneficial to accelerate the convergence and reduce the variance of estimates. Although the discounted criterion is appropriate for certain tasks such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Xiaoteng Ma , Xiaohang Tang , Li Xia , Jun Yang , Qianchuan Zhao

To date, distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) methods have exclusively focused on the discounted setting, where an agent aims to optimize a discounted sum of rewards over time. In this work, we extend distributional RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Juan Sebastian Rojas , Chi-Guhn Lee

Finding optimal policies which maximize long term rewards of Markov Decision Processes requires the use of dynamic programming and backward induction to solve the Bellman optimality equation. However, many real-world problems require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal

Many real-world systems problems require reasoning about the long term consequences of actions taken to configure and manage the system. These problems with delayed and often sequentially aggregated reward, are often inherently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-06 Ameer Haj-Ali , Nesreen K. Ahmed , Ted Willke , Joseph Gonzalez , Krste Asanovic , Ion Stoica

Robust Reinforcement Learning tries to make predictions more robust to changes in the dynamics or rewards of the system. This problem is particularly important when the dynamics and rewards of the environment are estimated from the data. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-15 Pierre Clavier , Stéphanie Allassonière , Erwan Le Pennec

Reinforcement learning is important part of artificial intelligence. In this paper, we review model-free reinforcement learning that utilizes the average reward optimality criterion in the infinite horizon setting. Motivated by the solo…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-04 Vektor Dewanto , George Dunn , Ali Eshragh , Marcus Gallagher , Fred Roosta

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) is a paradigm in which an RL agent learns to optimize a task using pair-wise preference-based feedback over trajectories, rather than explicit reward signals. While PbRL has demonstrated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Wenhao Zhan , Masatoshi Uehara , Wen Sun , Jason D. Lee

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) scales the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) but remains bottlenecked by limited labeled samples for continued data scaling. Reinforcement learning with intrinsic rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Chuyi Tan , Peiwen Yuan , Xinglin Wang , Yiwei Li , Shaoxiong Feng , Yueqi Zhang , Jiayi Shi , Ji Zhang , Boyuan Pan , Yao Hu , Kan Li

Any gradient descent optimization requires to choose a learning rate. With deeper and deeper models, tuning that learning rate can easily become tedious and does not necessarily lead to an ideal convergence. We propose a variation of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-04-10 Mathieu Ravaut , Satya Gorti

Advances in reinforcement learning research have demonstrated the ways in which different agent-based models can learn how to optimally perform a task within a given environment. Reinforcement leaning solves unsupervised problems where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-03 Herkulaas Combrink , Vukosi Marivate , Benjamin Rosman

In the traditional view of reinforcement learning, the agent's goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes its expected sum of rewards. Once the agent finds this policy, the learning ends. This view contrasts with \emph{continual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Esraa Elelimy , David Szepesvari , Martha White , Michael Bowling

Ensuring the safety of Reinforcement Learning (RL) is crucial for its deployment in real-world applications. Nevertheless, managing the trade-off between reward and safety during exploration presents a significant challenge. Improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Shangding Gu , Bilgehan Sel , Yuhao Ding , Lu Wang , Qingwei Lin , Ming Jin , Alois Knoll

Policy evaluation estimates the performance of a policy by (1) collecting data from the environment and (2) processing raw data into a meaningful estimate. Due to the sequential nature of reinforcement learning, any improper data-collecting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Shuze Daniel Liu , Claire Chen , Shangtong Zhang

Transfer learning of prediction models has been extensively studied, while the corresponding policy learning approaches are rarely discussed. In this paper, we propose principled approaches for learning the optimal policy in the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Xueqing Liu , Qinwei Yang , Zhaoqing Tian , Ruocheng Guo , Peng Wu

Alignment of large language models (LLMs) typically involves training a reward model on preference data, followed by policy optimization with respect to the reward model. However, optimizing policies with respect to a single reward model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Debangshu Banerjee , Kintan Saha , Aditya Gopalan

Standard reward models typically predict scalar scores that fail to capture the multifaceted nature of response quality in non-verifiable domains, such as creative writing or open-ended instruction following. To address this limitation, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Ran Xu , Tianci Liu , Zihan Dong , Tony Yu , Ilgee Hong , Carl Yang , Linjun Zhang , Tao Zhao , Haoyu Wang

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to discover better actions through exploration. However, typical exploration techniques aim to maximize rewards, often incurring high costs in both exploration and learning processes. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Akane Tsuboya , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi