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Reinforcement learning has become the central approach for language models (LMs) to learn from environmental reward or feedback. In practice, the environmental feedback is usually sparse and delayed. Learning from such signals is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Taiwei Shi , Sihao Chen , Bowen Jiang , Linxin Song , Longqi Yang , Jieyu Zhao

We present a scalable and effective exploration strategy based on Thompson sampling for reinforcement learning (RL). One of the key shortcomings of existing Thompson sampling algorithms is the need to perform a Gaussian approximation of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Haque Ishfaq , Qingfeng Lan , Pan Xu , A. Rupam Mahmood , Doina Precup , Anima Anandkumar , Kamyar Azizzadenesheli

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is a powerful set of techniques for imitation learning that aims to learn a reward function that rationalizes expert demonstrations. Unfortunately, traditional IRL methods suffer from a computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Gokul Swamy , Sanjiban Choudhury , J. Andrew Bagnell , Zhiwei Steven Wu

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

Robotic systems must be able to quickly and robustly make decisions when operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) can be used to compute optimal policies with little prior knowledge about the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-09-13 Yunpeng Pan , Xinyan Yan , Evangelos Theodorou , Byron Boots

Safe reinforcement learning aims to learn the optimal policy while satisfying safety constraints, which is essential in real-world applications. However, current algorithms still struggle for efficient policy updates with hard constraint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Linrui Zhang , Li Shen , Long Yang , Shixiang Chen , Bo Yuan , Xueqian Wang , Dacheng Tao

Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Simone Parisi , Alireza Kazemipour , Michael Bowling

We present a new model-based algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) which consists of explicit exploration and exploitation phases, and is applicable in large or infinite state spaces. The algorithm maintains a set of dynamics models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Mikael Henaff

We study the reinforcement learning (RL) problem in a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP), where an agent explores the environment to maximize the expected cumulative reward while satisfying a single constraint on the expected total…

We consider online learning for episodic stochastically constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), which plays a central role in ensuring the safety of reinforcement learning. Here the loss function can vary arbitrarily across the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Shuang Qiu , Xiaohan Wei , Zhuoran Yang , Jieping Ye , Zhaoran Wang

This paper considers the use of a simple posterior sampling algorithm to balance between exploration and exploitation when learning to optimize actions such as in multi-armed bandit problems. The algorithm, also known as Thompson Sampling,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-04 Daniel Russo , Benjamin Van Roy

Bayesian Reinforcement Learning (RL) is capable of not only incorporating domain knowledge, but also solving the exploration-exploitation dilemma in a natural way. As Bayesian RL is intractable except for special cases, previous work has…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-06-14 Kenji Kawaguchi , Mauricio Araya

While reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) significantly enhances LLM reasoning by optimizing the conditional distribution P(y|x), its potential is fundamentally bounded by the base model's existing output distribution.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Yuqiao Tan , Minzheng Wang , Bo Liu , Zichen Liu , Tian Liang , Shizhu He , Jun Zhao , Kang Liu

Bayesian reinforcement learning (BRL) is a method that merges principles from Bayesian statistics and reinforcement learning to make optimal decisions in uncertain environments. As a model-based RL method, it has two key components: (1)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-03 Shreya Sinha Roy , Richard G. Everitt , Christian P. Robert , Ritabrata Dutta

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved impressive successes yet often requires a very large amount of interaction data. This result is perhaps unsurprising, as using complicated function approximation often requires more data to fit, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Jonathan N. Lee , Aldo Pacchiano , Vidya Muthukumar , Weihao Kong , Emma Brunskill

The theory of reinforcement learning has focused on two fundamental problems: achieving low regret, and identifying $\epsilon$-optimal policies. While a simple reduction allows one to apply a low-regret algorithm to obtain an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Andrew Wagenmaker , Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson

Provably efficient Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) based on optimism or posterior sampling (PSRL) is ensured to attain the global optimality asymptotically by introducing the complexity measure of the model. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Shenao Zhang

We develop several provably efficient model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We consider both online setting and the setting with access to a simulator. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Zihan Zhang , Qiaomin Xie

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that users specify tasks by manually writing down a reward function. However, this process can be laborious and demands considerable technical expertise. Can we devise RL algorithms that instead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

The function approximators employed by traditional image-based Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms usually lack a temporal learning component and instead focus on learning the spatial component. We propose a technique, Temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Deepak George Thomas , Tichakorn Wongpiromsarn , Ali Jannesari