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Related papers: Using Natural Language for Reward Shaping in Reinf…

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We introduce Reward-Zero, a general-purpose implicit reward mechanism that transforms natural-language task descriptions into dense, semantically grounded progress signals for reinforcement learning (RL). Reward-Zero serves as a simple yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Heng Zhang , Haddy Alchaer , Arash Ajoudani , Yu She

Reward design for reinforcement learning agents can be difficult in situations where one not only wants the agent to achieve some effect in the world but where one also cares about how that effect is achieved. For example, we might wish for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-25 Xiangyu Peng , Christopher Cui , Wei Zhou , Renee Jia , Mark Riedl

We tackle the problem of aligning pre-trained large language models (LMs) with human preferences. If we view text generation as a sequential decision-making problem, reinforcement learning (RL) appears to be a natural conceptual framework.…

Designing effective reward functions is crucial to training reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. However, this design is non-trivial, even for domain experts, due to the subjective nature of certain tasks that are hard to quantify…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Rishi Hazra , Alkis Sygkounas , Andreas Persson , Amy Loutfi , Pedro Zuidberg Dos Martires

Transfer of recent advances in deep reinforcement learning to real-world applications is hindered by high data demands and thus low efficiency and scalability. Through independent improvements of components such as replay buffers or more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 André Eberhard , Houssam Metni , Georg Fahland , Alexander Stroh , Pascal Friederich

Over its lifetime, a reinforcement learning agent is often tasked with different tasks. How to efficiently adapt a previously learned control policy from one task to another, remains an open research question. In this paper, we investigate…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-10-10 Matthias Hutsebaut-Buysse , Kevin Mets , Steven Latré

The inherent uncertainty in the environmental transition model of Reinforcement Learning (RL) necessitates a delicate balance between exploration and exploitation. This balance is crucial for optimizing computational resources to accurately…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Yongxin Deng , Xihe Qiu , Jue Chen , Xiaoyu Tan

In this work, we investigate how to leverage pre-trained visual-language models (VLM) for online Reinforcement Learning (RL). In particular, we focus on sparse reward tasks with pre-defined textual task descriptions. We first identify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Yuwei Fu , Haichao Zhang , Di Wu , Wei Xu , Benoit Boulet

Reinforcement learning (RL) studies how an agent comes to achieve reward in an environment through interactions over time. Recent advances in machine RL have surpassed human expertise at the world's oldest board games and many classic video…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-28 Pedro A. Tsividis , Joao Loula , Jake Burga , Nathan Foss , Andres Campero , Thomas Pouncy , Samuel J. Gershman , Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is commonly used in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback to align large language models (LLMs) with downstream tasks. This paper investigates the feasibility of using PPO for direct reinforcement…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Alexander G. Padula , Dennis J. N. J. Soemers

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach for solving various control, optimization, and sequential decision making tasks. However, designing reward functions for complex tasks (e.g., with multiple objectives and safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-23 Xuan Zhao , Marcos Campos

Learning reward functions for physical skills are challenging due to the vast spectrum of skills, the high-dimensionality of state and action space, and nuanced sensory feedback. The complexity of these tasks makes acquiring expert…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Yuwei Zeng , Yiqing Xu

For task-oriented dialog systems, training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based Dialog Management module suffers from low sample efficiency and slow convergence speed due to the sparse rewards in RL.To solve this problem, many strategies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Zhengxu Hou , Bang Liu , Ruihui Zhao , Zijing Ou , Yafei Liu , Xi Chen , Yefeng Zheng

While deep reinforcement learning techniques have led to agents that are successfully able to learn to perform a number of tasks that had been previously unlearnable, these techniques are still susceptible to the longstanding problem of…

Multimedia · Computer Science 2019-06-07 Nicholas Waytowich , Sean L. Barton , Vernon Lawhern , Ethan Stump , Garrett Warnell

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated strong potential in training large language models (LLMs) capable of complex reasoning for real-world problem solving. More recently, RL has been leveraged to create sophisticated LLM-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Bowen Jin , Jinsung Yoon , Priyanka Kargupta , Sercan O. Arik , Jiawei Han

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

We investigated Agentic RL with large language models on the \textsc{TravelPlanner} benchmark. Our approach, \textsc{Planner-R1}, achieved a \textbf{56.9\%} final-pass rate with only 180 training queries, a $2.7\times$ improvement over…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Siyu Zhu , Yanbin Jiang , Hejian Sang , Shao Tang , Qingquan Song , Biao He , Rohit Jain , Zhipeng Wang , Alborz Geramifard

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated high performance on tasks expressed in natural language, particularly in zero- or few-shot settings. These are typically framed as supervised (e.g., classification) or unsupervised (e.g.,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Yarik Menchaca Resendiz , Roman Klinger

Reinforcement Learning (RL) suffers from sample inefficiency in sparse reward domains, and the problem is further pronounced in case of stochastic transitions. To improve the sample efficiency, reward shaping is a well-studied approach to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Siddhant Bhambri , Amrita Bhattacharjee , Durgesh Kalwar , Lin Guan , Huan Liu , Subbarao Kambhampati

To be successful in real-world tasks, Reinforcement Learning (RL) needs to exploit the compositional, relational, and hierarchical structure of the world, and learn to transfer it to the task at hand. Recent advances in representation…