English
Related papers

Related papers: Environment Shaping in Reinforcement Learning usin…

200 papers

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

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

Reinforcement learning for embodied agents is a challenging problem. The accumulated reward to be optimized is often a very rugged function, and gradient methods are impaired by many local optimizers. We demonstrate, in an experimental…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-06-01 Guido Montufar , Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi , Nihat Ay

While humans readily generalize abstract concepts to more complex or larger tasks, building Reinforcement Learning (RL) systems with this ability remains elusive. Here, we present the first theoretical model of how such Out-of-Distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Nasehatul Mustakim , Lucas Lehnert

Reinforcement learning (RL) has substantially improved the ability of large language model (LLM) agents to interact with environments and solve multi-turn tasks. However, effective agentic RL remains challenging: sparse outcome-only rewards…

The field of Reinforcement Learning (RL) has garnered increasing attention for its ability of optimizing user retention in recommender systems. A primary obstacle in this optimization process is the environment non-stationarity stemming…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Zhenghai Xue , Qingpeng Cai , Bin Yang , Lantao Hu , Peng Jiang , Kun Gai , Bo An

Developing an agent capable of adapting to unseen environments remains a difficult challenge in imitation learning. This work presents Adaptive Return-conditioned Policy (ARP), an efficient framework designed to enhance the agent's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Changyeon Kim , Younggyo Seo , Hao Liu , Lisa Lee , Jinwoo Shin , Honglak Lee , Kimin Lee

Recently there has been a proliferation of intrinsic motivation (IM) reward-shaping methods to learn in complex and sparse-reward environments. These methods can often inadvertently change the set of optimal policies in an environment,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Grant C. Forbes , Leonardo Villalobos-Arias , Jianxun Wang , Arnav Jhala , David L. Roberts

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language, but their performance is highly sensitive to prompt formulation. We propose a reinforcement-learning-based framework that models prompt refinement as a sequential…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Ali Mohammadi Esfahani , Nafiseh Kahani , Samuel A. Ajila

Embodied agents struggle to generalize to new environments, even when those environments share similar underlying structures to their training settings. Most current approaches to generating these training environments follow an open-loop…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Teresa Yeo , Dulaj Weerakoon , Dulanga Weerakoon , Archan Misra

We study what actually works and what doesn't for training large language models as agents via multi-turn reinforcement learning. Despite rapid progress, existing frameworks and definitions are fragmented, and there is no systematic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Ruiyi Wang , Prithviraj Ammanabrolu

We consider the problem of building a state representation model in a continual fashion. As the environment changes, the aim is to efficiently compress the sensory state's information without losing past knowledge. The learned features are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-12 Hugo Caselles-Dupré , Michael Garcia-Ortiz , David Filliat

Capturing and simulating intelligent adaptive behaviours within spatially explicit individual-based models remains an ongoing challenge for researchers. While an ever-increasing abundance of real-world behavioural data are collected, few…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-01-05 Sedar Olmez , Dan Birks , Alison Heppenstall

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

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

In this paper, we study a transfer reinforcement learning problem where the state transitions and rewards are affected by the environmental context. Specifically, we consider a demonstrator agent that has access to a context-aware policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-11 Yan Zhang , Michael M. Zavlanos

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their selection of actions to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Temporal Difference (TD) Learning -- a model-free RL method -- is a leading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

We investigate a paradigm in multi-task reinforcement learning (MT-RL) in which an agent is placed in an environment and needs to learn to perform a series of tasks, within this space. Since the environment does not change, there is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-03-08 Diana Borsa , Thore Graepel , John Shawe-Taylor

An appropriate reward function is of paramount importance in specifying a task in reinforcement learning (RL). Yet, it is known to be extremely challenging in practice to design a correct reward function for even simple tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-19 Dingwen Kong , Lin F. Yang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal