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The average-reward formulation of reinforcement learning (RL) has drawn increased interest in recent years for its ability to solve temporally-extended problems without relying on discounting. Meanwhile, in the discounted setting,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Jacob Adamczyk , Volodymyr Makarenko , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

In reinforcement learning (RL), the ability to utilize prior knowledge from previously solved tasks can allow agents to quickly solve new problems. In some cases, these new problems may be approximately solved by composing the solutions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-02 Jacob Adamczyk , Argenis Arriojas , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Typical RL methods optimize under an overall sequence reward, which can lead to a suboptimal learning process. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Yanshi Li , Shaopan Xiong , Gengru Chen , Xiaoyang Li , Yijia Luo , Xingyuan Bu , Yingshui Tan , Wenbo Su , Bo Zheng

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in performing complex multi-step reasoning, yet they continue to struggle with mathematical reasoning, often making systematic errors. A promising solution is reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Hanning Zhang , Pengcheng Wang , Shizhe Diao , Yong Lin , Rui Pan , Hanze Dong , Dylan Zhang , Pavlo Molchanov , Tong Zhang

The temporal credit assignment problem is a central challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL), concerned with attributing the appropriate influence to each actions in a trajectory for their ability to achieve a goal. However, when feedback…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-20 Eduardo Pignatelli , Johan Ferret , Tim Rockäschel , Edward Grefenstette , Davide Paglieri , Samuel Coward , Laura Toni

In reinforcement learning, two objective functions have been developed extensively in the literature: discounted and averaged rewards. The generalization to an entropy-regularized setting has led to improved robustness and exploration for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-20 Jacob Adamczyk , Volodymyr Makarenko , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

Credit assignment in reinforcement learning is the problem of measuring an action's influence on future rewards. In particular, this requires separating skill from luck, i.e. disentangling the effect of an action on rewards from that of…

One of the preeminent obstacles to scaling multi-agent reinforcement learning to large numbers of agents is assigning credit to individual agents' actions. In this paper, we address this credit assignment problem with an approach that we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-24 Benjamin Freed , Aditya Kapoor , Ian Abraham , Jeff Schneider , Howie Choset

Reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled complex reasoning abilities in large language models (LLMs). However, most RL algorithms suffer from performance saturation, preventing continued gains as RL training scales. This problem can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Bolian Li , Yifan Wang , Yi Ding , Anamika Lochab , Ananth Grama , Ruqi Zhang

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

Recent work, spanning from autonomous vehicle coordination to in-space assembly, has shown the importance of learning collaborative behavior for enabling robots to achieve shared goals. A common approach for learning this cooperative…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Kartik Nagpal , Dayi Dong , Jean-Baptiste Bouvier , Negar Mehr

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover the reward function and the associated optimal policy that best fits observed sequences of states and actions implemented by an expert. Many algorithms for IRL have an inherently nested…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-02 Siliang Zeng , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become an effective post-training method for improving the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods mainly apply uniform optimization…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Jiakang Wang , Runze Liu , Fuzheng Zhang , Xiu Li , Guorui Zhou , Ling Pan

Option-critic learning is a general-purpose reinforcement learning (RL) framework that aims to address the issue of long term credit assignment by leveraging temporal abstractions. However, when dealing with extended timescales, discounting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Akshay Dharmavaram , Matthew Riemer , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for tasks requiring complex reasoning, prompting significant interest in improving their reasoning abilities through post-training. Especially RL based methods using verifiable reward,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Prasanna Parthasarathi , Mathieu Reymond , Boxing Chen , Yufei Cui , Sarath Chandar

The rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) has led to remarkable performance gains across a wide range of tasks. However, when handling long documents that exceed the model's context window limit, the entire context cannot be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Li Wang , Yandong Wang , Xin Yu , Kui Zhang , Tianhao Peng , Wenjun Wu

We establish a new connection between value and policy based reinforcement learning (RL) based on a relationship between softmax temporal value consistency and policy optimality under entropy regularization. Specifically, we show that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-27 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Kelvin Xu , Dale Schuurmans

We consider the problem of efficient credit assignment in reinforcement learning. In order to efficiently and meaningfully utilize new data, we propose to explicitly assign credit to past decisions based on the likelihood of them having led…

Various methods for solving the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem have been developed independently in machine learning and economics. In particular, the method of Maximum Causal Entropy IRL is based on the perspective of entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-05 Navyata Sanghvi , Shinnosuke Usami , Mohit Sharma , Joachim Groeger , Kris Kitani

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), but sparse outcome rewards make token-level credit assignment difficult. We study token-level credit as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yuhang He , Haodong Wu , Siyi Liu , Hongyu Ge , Hange Zhou , Keyi Wu , Zhuo Zheng , Qihong Lin , Zixin Zhong , Yongqi Zhang