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Designing suitable reward functions for numerous interacting intelligent agents is challenging in real-world applications. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) in mean field games (MFGs) offers a practical framework to infer reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Yang Chen , Xiao Lin , Bo Yan , Libo Zhang , Jiamou Liu , Neset Özkan Tan , Michael Witbrock

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) is a promising approach that enables the agent to learn new tasks quickly. However, most meta-RL algorithms show poor generalization in multi-task scenarios due to the insufficient task information…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Xiangtong Yao , Zhenshan Bing , Genghang Zhuang , Kejia Chen , Hongkuan Zhou , Kai Huang , Alois Knoll

Today's generative models thrive with large amounts of supervised data and informative reward functions characterizing the quality of the generation. They work under the assumptions that the supervised data provides knowledge to pre-train…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Sangyun Lee , Brandon Amos , Giulia Fanti

Agentic reinforcement learning (Agentic RL) has achieved strong progress in tasks with clear success signals. However, many real-world agent applications require user-conditioned behavior: the same query may call for different planning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Ranxu zhang , zeyang li , Jiacheng Huang , Rui Zhang , Xiaozhou Xu , sun zhe , Yanyong Zhang , Chao Wang

Imitation learning is well-suited for robotic tasks where it is difficult to directly program the behavior or specify a cost for optimal control. In this work, we propose a method for learning the reward function (and the corresponding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Tianwei Ni , Harshit Sikchi , Yufei Wang , Tejus Gupta , Lisa Lee , Benjamin Eysenbach

The success of deep networks is crucially attributed to their ability to capture latent features within a representation space. In this work, we investigate whether the underlying learned features of a model can be efficiently retrieved…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Akash Kumar

Extrapolating beyond-demonstrator (BD) performance through the imitation learning (IL) algorithm aims to learn from and subsequently outperform the demonstrator. To that end, a representative approach is to leverage inverse reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-28 Mingqi Yuan , Mao-on Pun

Learning to rank (LTR) plays a crucial role in various Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. Although supervised LTR methods based on fine-grained relevance labels (e.g., document-level annotations) have achieved significant success, their…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Yiteng Tu , Zhichao Xu , Tao Yang , Weihang Su , Yujia Zhou , Yiqun Liu , Fen Lin , Qin Liu , Qingyao Ai

When applying reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), the reward is learned from data and, therefore, always has some error. It is common to mitigate this by regularizing the policy with KL divergence from a base model, with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Thomas Kwa , Drake Thomas , Adrià Garriga-Alonso

In this paper, we study cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) where the joint reward exhibits submodularity, which is a natural property capturing diminishing marginal returns when adding agents to a team. Unlike standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Wenjing Chen , Chengyuan Qian , Shuo Xing , Yi Zhou , Victoria Crawford

Distilling large language models (LLMs) typically involves transferring the teacher model's responses through supervised fine-tuning (SFT). However, this approach neglects the potential to distill both data (output content) and reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Yudi Zhang , Lu Wang , Meng Fang , Yali Du , Chenghua Huang , Jun Wang , Qingwei Lin , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Dongmei Zhang , Saravan Rajmohan , Qi Zhang

Reward models (RMs) are a core component in the post-training of large language models (LLMs), serving as proxies for human preference evaluation and guiding model alignment. However, training reliable RMs under limited resources remains…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Dengcan Liu , Jiahao Li , Zheren Fu , Yi Tu , Jiajun Li , Zhendong Mao , Yongdong Zhang

A common challenge in reinforcement learning is how to convert the agent's interactions with an environment into fast and robust learning. For instance, earlier work makes use of domain knowledge to improve existing reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-01 Yannis Flet-Berliac , Philippe Preux

Most reinforcement learning (RL) methods for training large language models (LLMs) require ground-truth labels or task-specific verifiers, limiting scalability when correctness is ambiguous or expensive to obtain. We introduce Reinforcement…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Micah Rentschler , Jesse Roberts

The ability of reinforcement learning algorithms to learn effective policies is determined by the rewards available during training. However, for practical problems, obtaining large quantities of reward labels is often infeasible due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Shreyas Chaudhari , Renhao Zhang , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a sub-domain of machine learning, mainly concerned with solving sequential decision-making problems by a learning agent that interacts with the decision environment to improve its behavior through the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Hossein Hassani , Ehsan Hallaji , Roozbeh Razavi-Far , Mehrdad Saif , Liang Lin

While large language models excel in diverse domains, their performance on complex longhorizon agentic decision-making tasks remains limited. Most existing methods concentrate on designing effective reward models (RMs) to advance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Zhicong Lu , Zichuan Lin , Wei Jia , Changyuan Tian , Deheng Ye , Peiguang Li , Li Jin , Nayu Liu , Guangluan Xu , Wei Feng

How well do reward functions learned with inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) generalize? We illustrate that state-of-the-art IRL algorithms, which maximize a maximum-entropy objective, learn rewards that overfit to the demonstrations.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-29 Andrew Szot , Amy Zhang , Dhruv Batra , Zsolt Kira , Franziska Meier

Preference learning (PL) with large language models (LLMs) aims to align the LLMs' generations with human preferences. Previous work on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has demonstrated promising results in in-distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Chen Jia