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Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a rapidly growing area of machine learning that finds its application in a broad range of domains, from finance and healthcare to robotics and gaming. Compared to other machine learning techniques, RL agents…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Geetansh Kalra , Divye Singh , Justin Jose

Saliency methods are widely used to interpret neural network predictions, but different variants of saliency methods often disagree even on the interpretations of the same prediction made by the same model. In these cases, how do we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-14 Shuoyang Ding , Philipp Koehn

The ability to autonomously explore and resolve tasks with minimal human guidance is crucial for the self-development of embodied intelligence. Although reinforcement learning methods can largely ease human effort, it's challenging to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Changxin Huang , Yanbin Chang , Junfan Lin , Junyang Liang , Runhao Zeng , Jianqiang Li

Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Simone Parisi , Alireza Kazemipour , Michael Bowling

Reward models play a critical role in guiding large language models toward outputs that align with human expectations. However, an open challenge remains in effectively utilizing test-time compute to enhance reward model performance. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Jiaxin Guo , Zewen Chi , Li Dong , Qingxiu Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Furu Wei

Reward models (RMs) play a crucial role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences and enhancing reasoning quality. Traditionally, RMs are trained to rank candidate outputs based on their correctness and coherence.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Yuhui Xu , Hanze Dong , Lei Wang , Caiming Xiong , Junnan Li

Inverse reinforcement learning methods aim to retrieve the reward function of a Markov decision process based on a dataset of expert demonstrations. The commonplace scarcity and heterogeneous sources of such demonstrations can lead to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Ivan Ovinnikov , Eugene Bykovets , Joachim M. Buhmann

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central problem in artificial intelligence. This problem consists of defining artificial agents that can learn optimal behaviour by interacting with an environment -- where the optimal behaviour is defined…

The development of trustworthy conversational information-seeking systems relies on dialogue models that can generate faithful and accurate responses based on relevant knowledge texts. However, two main challenges hinder this task. Firstly,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Wanyu Du , Yangfeng Ji

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

Simulating trajectories of virtual crowds is a commonly encountered task in Computer Graphics. Several recent works have applied Reinforcement Learning methods to animate virtual agents, however they often make different design choices when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Ariel Kwiatkowski , Vicky Kalogeiton , Julien Pettré , Marie-Paule Cani

Reward learning typically relies on a single feedback type or combines multiple feedback types using manually weighted loss terms. Currently, it remains unclear how to jointly learn reward functions from heterogeneous feedback types such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Raphaël Baur , Yannick Metz , Maria Gkoulta , Mennatallah El-Assady , Giorgia Ramponi , Thomas Kleine Buening

Language models trained on large-scale datasets have been shown to learn features that encode abstract concepts such as factuality or intent. Such features are traditionally used for test-time monitoring or steering. We present an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Aaditya Vikram Prasad , Connor Watts , Jack Merullo , Dhruvil Gala , Owen Lewis , Thomas McGrath , Ekdeep Singh Lubana

Reward models have been increasingly critical for improving the reasoning capability of LLMs. Existing research has shown that a well-trained reward model can substantially improve model performances at inference time via search. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Jiaxuan Gao , Shusheng Xu , Wenjie Ye , Weilin Liu , Chuyi He , Wei Fu , Zhiyu Mei , Guangju Wang , Yi Wu

Learning from Demonstrations (LfD) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) have enabled robot agents to accomplish complex tasks. Reward Machines (RMs) enhance RL's capability to train policies over extended time horizons by structuring high-level…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Mattijs Baert , Sam Leroux , Pieter Simoens

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable results in image generation, and have similarly been used to learn high-performing policies in sequential decision-making tasks. Decision-making diffusion models can be trained on lower-quality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Felipe Nuti , Tim Franzmeyer , João F. Henriques

Reinforcement learning is increasingly used for code-centric tasks. These tasks include code generation, summarization, understanding, repair, testing, and optimization. This trend is growing faster with large language models and autonomous…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Md Rayhanul Masud , Azmine Toushik Wasi , Salman Rahman , Md Rizwan Parvez

Properly defining a reward signal to efficiently train a reinforcement learning (RL) agent is a challenging task. Designing balanced objective functions from which a desired behavior can emerge requires expert knowledge, especially for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Timo Kaufmann , Jannis Blüml , Antonia Wüst , Quentin Delfosse , Kristian Kersting , Eyke Hüllermeier

Reward Machines provide an automaton-inspired structure for specifying instructions, safety constraints, and other temporally extended reward-worthy behaviour. By exposing the underlying structure of a reward function, they enable the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Andrew C. Li , Zizhao Chen , Toryn Q. Klassen , Pashootan Vaezipoor , Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Sheila A. McIlraith

Generating complex behaviors that satisfy the preferences of non-expert users is a crucial requirement for AI agents. Interactive reward learning from trajectory comparisons (a.k.a. RLHF) is one way to allow non-expert users to convey…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Lin Guan , Karthik Valmeekam , Subbarao Kambhampati