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This paper investigates whether learning contingency-awareness and controllable aspects of an environment can lead to better exploration in reinforcement learning. To investigate this question, we consider an instantiation of this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-05 Jongwook Choi , Yijie Guo , Marcin Moczulski , Junhyuk Oh , Neal Wu , Mohammad Norouzi , Honglak Lee

Sparse reward environments in reinforcement learning (RL) pose significant challenges for exploration, often leading to inefficient or incomplete learning processes. To tackle this issue, this work proposes a teacher-student RL framework…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Unai Ruiz-Gonzalez , Alain Andres , Pedro G. Bascoy , Javier Del Ser

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

Current research in dialogue systems is focused on conversational assistants working on short conversations in either task-oriented or open domain settings. In this paper, we focus on improving task-based conversational assistants online,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-06 Ruijie Zhou , Soham Deshmukh , Jeremiah Greer , Charles Lee

In social impact optimization, AI decision systems often rely on solvers that optimize well-calibrated mathematical objectives. However, these solvers cannot directly accommodate evolving human preferences, typically expressed in natural…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Guojun Xiong , Milind Tambe

Whereas machine learning models typically learn language by directly training on language tasks (e.g., next-word prediction), language emerges in human children as a byproduct of solving non-language tasks (e.g., acquiring food). Motivated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Evan Zheran Liu , Sahaana Suri , Tong Mu , Allan Zhou , Chelsea Finn

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) agents accomplish given tasks while adhering to specific constraints. Employing constraints expressed via easily-understandable human language offers considerable potential for real-world applications due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Xingzhou Lou , Junge Zhang , Ziyan Wang , Kaiqi Huang , Yali Du

To align conditional text generation model outputs with desired behaviors, there has been an increasing focus on training the model using reinforcement learning (RL) with reward functions learned from human annotations. Under this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Richard Yuanzhe Pang , Vishakh Padmakumar , Thibault Sellam , Ankur P. Parikh , He He

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown its strength in challenging sequential decision-making problems. The reward function in RL is crucial to the learning performance, as it serves as a measure of the task completion degree. In real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Siyuan Li , Shijie Han , Yingnan Zhao , By Liang , Peng Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled the training of large language model (LLM) agents to interact with the environment and to solve multi-turn long-horizon tasks. However, the RL-trained agents often struggle in tasks that require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Yulun Jiang , Liangze Jiang , Damien Teney , Michael Moor , Maria Brbic

Mathematical reasoning is a key benchmark for large language models. Reinforcement learning is a standard post-training mechanism for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models, yet performance remains sensitive to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Arash Ahmadi , Sarah Sharif , Yaser , Banad

Reinforcement Learning (RL) in environments with complex, history-dependent reward structures poses significant challenges for traditional methods. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that leverages automaton-based feedback to guide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Mahyar Alinejad , Alvaro Velasquez , Yue Wang , George Atia

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) are two powerful approaches for building autonomous agents. However, due to limited understanding of the game environment, agents often resort to inefficient exploration and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Ziyu Chen , Zhiqing Xiao , Xinbei Jiang , Junbo Zhao

We propose a method for training language models in an interactive setting inspired by child language acquisition. In our setting, a speaker attempts to communicate some information to a listener in a single-turn dialogue and receives a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Lennart Stöpler , Rufat Asadli , Mitja Nikolaus , Ryan Cotterell , Alex Warstadt

Common approaches to Reinforcement Learning (RL) are seriously challenged by large-scale applications involving huge state spaces and sparse delayed reward feedback. Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) methods attempt to address this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-04-15 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

Designing efficient reward functions for low-level control tasks is a challenging problem. Recent research aims to reduce reliance on expert experience by using Large Language Models (LLMs) with task information to generate dense reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Ning Gao , Xiuhui Zhang , Xingyu Jiang , Mukang You , Mohan Zhang , Yue Deng

Reward models are central to large language model (LLM) post-training. However, past work has shown that they can reward spurious or undesirable attributes such as length, format, hallucinations, and sycophancy. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Atticus Wang , Iván Arcuschin , Arthur Conmy

Learning to solve sparse-reward reinforcement learning problems is difficult, due to the lack of guidance towards the goal. But in some problems, prior knowledge can be used to augment the learning process. Reward shaping is a way to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-14 Zhao Yang , Mike Preuss , Aske Plaat

From a young age humans learn to use grammatical principles to hierarchically combine words into sentences. Action grammars is the parallel idea, that there is an underlying set of rules (a "grammar") that govern how we hierarchically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-24 Petros Christodoulou , Robert Tjarko Lange , Ali Shafti , A. Aldo Faisal