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There has been significant progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) in recent years. Nevertheless, finding suitable hyperparameter configurations and reward functions remains challenging even for experts, and performance heavily relies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Julian Dierkes , Emma Cramer , Holger H. Hoos , Sebastian Trimpe

We study deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with delayed rewards. In many real-world tasks, instant rewards are often not readily accessible or even defined immediately after the agent performs actions. In this work, we first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Beining Han , Zhizhou Ren , Zuofan Wu , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng

Preference-based reward learning is widely used for shaping agent behavior to match a user's preference, yet its sparse binary feedback makes it especially vulnerable to causal confusion. The learned reward often latches onto spurious…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Minjune Hwang , Yigit Korkmaz , Daniel Seita , Erdem Bıyık

Reinforcement learning is a proven technique for an agent to learn a task. However, when learning a task using reinforcement learning, the agent cannot distinguish the characteristics of the environment from those of the task. This makes it…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-08-10 Pieter Van Molle , Tim Verbelen , Steven Bohez , Sam Leroux , Pieter Simoens , Bart Dhoedt

Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable performance in solving complex problems via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). Although existing RL algorithms significantly enhance model accuracy,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Zezhong Tan , Hang Gao , Xinhong Ma , Feng Zhang , Ziqiang Dong

Learning reward functions from data is a promising path towards achieving scalable Reinforcement Learning (RL) for robotics. However, a major challenge in training agents from learned reward models is that the agent can learn to exploit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-04 Danfei Xu , Misha Denil

Connector insertion and many other tasks commonly found in modern manufacturing settings involve complex contact dynamics and friction. Since it is difficult to capture related physical effects with first-order modeling, traditional control…

Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-10 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

We consider schemes for obtaining truthful reports on a common but hidden signal from large groups of rational, self-interested agents. One example are online feedback mechanisms, where users provide observations about the quality of a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2014-01-16 Radu Jurca , Boi Faltings

Autonomous agents must often deal with conflicting requirements, such as completing tasks using the least amount of time/energy, learning multiple tasks, or dealing with multiple opponents. In the context of reinforcement learning~(RL),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Santiago Paternain , Luiz F. O. Chamon , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro

Single-task RL agents are typically trained under a fixed reward function, which limits their robustness to reward misspecification and their ability to adapt to changing preferences. We introduce Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan , Pieter Abbeel

The complexity of designing reward functions has been a major obstacle to the wide application of deep reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. Describing an agent's desired behaviors and properties can be difficult, even for experts. A new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Wanqi Xue , Bo An , Shuicheng Yan , Zhongwen Xu

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has improved the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by using rule-based binary feedback. However, current RLVR methods typically assign the same reward to every token.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Guofu Xie , Yunsheng Shi , Hongtao Tian , Ting Yao , Xiao Zhang

A key impediment to reinforcement learning (RL) in real applications with limited, batch data is defining a reward function that reflects what we implicitly know about reasonable behaviour for a task and allows for robust off-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Niranjani Prasad , Barbara E Engelhardt , Finale Doshi-Velez

Recent large reasoning models (LRMs) driven by reinforcement learning algorithms (e.g., GRPO) have achieved remarkable performance on challenging reasoning tasks. However, these models suffer from overthinking, generating unnecessarily long…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Gang Li , Yan Chen , Ming Lin , Tianbao Yang

Reward function design and exploration time are arguably the biggest obstacles to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real world. In many real-world tasks, designing a reward function takes considerable hand…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-06-14 Pierre Sermanet , Kelvin Xu , Sergey Levine

Reward functions are central in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding agents towards optimal decision-making. The complexity of RL tasks requires meticulously designed reward functions that effectively drive learning while avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Rati Devidze

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm in Artificial Intelligence (AI), enabling agents to learn optimal behaviors through interactions with their environments. Drawing from the foundations of trial and error, RL…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Majid Ghasemi , Amir Hossein Moosavi , Dariush Ebrahimi

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

Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task. This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Dhawal Gupta , Yash Chandak , Scott M. Jordan , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva