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When a person is not satisfied with how a robot performs a task, they can intervene to correct it. Reward learning methods enable the robot to adapt its reward function online based on such human input, but they rely on handcrafted…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-01-13 Andreea Bobu , Marius Wiggert , Claire Tomlin , Anca D. Dragan

Reward design remains a critical bottleneck in visual reinforcement learning (RL) for robotic manipulation. In simulated environments, rewards are conventionally designed based on the distance to a target position. However, such precise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Nan Tang , Jing-Cheng Pang , Guanlin Li , Chao Qian , Yang Yu

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) experiments have notoriously high variance, and minor details can have disproportionately large effects on measured outcomes. This is problematic for creating reproducible research and also serves as an obstacle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Johan Bjorck , Carla P. Gomes , Kilian Q. Weinberger

(This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible.) To improve the efficiency of deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Gang Peng , Jin Yang , Xinde Lia , Mohammad Omar Khyam

Despite the fact that deep reinforcement learning (RL) has surpassed human-level performances in various tasks, it still has several fundamental challenges. First, most RL methods require intensive data from the exploration of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Zhe Xu , Bo Wu , Aditya Ojha , Daniel Neider , Ufuk Topcu

Reinforcement learning (RL), a common tool in decision making, learns control policies from various experiences based on the associated cumulative return/rewards without treating them differently. Humans, on the contrary, often learn to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

The optimal objective is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how policies are evaluated and optimized. While total return maximization is the ideal objective in RL, discounted return maximization is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Shuyu Yin , Fei Wen , Peilin Liu , Tao Luo

Reward design is a critical part of the application of reinforcement learning, the performance of which strongly depends on how well the reward signal frames the goal of the designer and how well the signal assesses progress in reaching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Yixiang Wang , Yujing Hu , Feng Wu , Yingfeng Chen

Mastering robotic manipulation skills through reinforcement learning (RL) typically requires the design of shaped reward functions. Recent developments in this area have demonstrated that using sparse rewards, i.e. rewarding the agent only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-12 Ozsel Kilinc , Giovanni Montana

In reinforcement learning (RL), the consideration of multivariate reward signals has led to fundamental advancements in multi-objective decision-making, transfer learning, and representation learning. This work introduces the first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Harley Wiltzer , Jesse Farebrother , Arthur Gretton , Mark Rowland

The broader application of reinforcement learning (RL) is limited by challenges including data efficiency, generalization capability, and ability to learn in sparse-reward environments. Meta-learning has emerged as a promising approach to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Octavio Pappalardo , Rodrigo Ramele , Juan Miguel Santos

We consider the problem of imitation learning from a finite set of expert trajectories, without access to reinforcement signals. The classical approach of extracting the expert's reward function via inverse reinforcement learning, followed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Ruohan Wang , Carlo Ciliberto , Pierluigi Amadori , Yiannis Demiris

While reinforcement learning (RL) has been successful in natural language processing (NLP) domains such as dialogue generation and text-based games, it typically faces the problem of sparse rewards that leads to slow or no convergence.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Ameet Deshpande , Eve Fleisig

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective approach to motion planning in autonomous driving, where an optimal driving policy can be automatically learned using the interaction data with the environment. Nevertheless, the reward function…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Lin-Chi Wu , Zengjie Zhang , Sofie Haesaert , Zhiqiang Ma , Zhiyong Sun

Reinforcement learning agents are fundamentally limited by the quality of the reward functions they learn from, yet reward design is often overlooked under the assumption that a well-defined reward is readily available. However, in…

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems can be complex and non-interpretable, making it challenging for non-AI experts to understand or intervene in their decisions. This is due in part to the sequential nature of RL in which actions are chosen…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Amal Alabdulkarim , Madhuri Singh , Gennie Mansi , Kaely Hall , Upol Ehsan , Mark O. Riedl

In practice, reinforcement learning (RL) agents are often trained with a possibly imperfect proxy reward function, which may lead to a human-agent alignment issue (i.e., the learned policy either converges to non-optimal performance with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Zhaohui Jiang , Xuening Feng , Paul Weng , Yifei Zhu , Yan Song , Tianze Zhou , Yujing Hu , Tangjie Lv , Changjie Fan

Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a central optimisation framework in machine learning. Although RL agents can converge to optimal solutions, the definition of ``optimality'' depends on the environment's statistical properties. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Bert Verbruggen , Arne Vanhoyweghen , Vincent Ginis

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) replaces costly human labeling with automated verifiers. To reduce verifier hacking, many RLVR systems binarize rewards to $\{0,1\}$, but imperfect verifiers inevitably introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Xin-Qiang Cai , Wei Wang , Feng Liu , Tongliang Liu , Gang Niu , Masashi Sugiyama