English
Related papers

Related papers: Self-Supervised Online Reward Shaping in Sparse-Re…

200 papers

Model-based offline reinforcement learning trains policies using pre-collected datasets and learned environment models, eliminating the need for direct real-world environment interaction. However, this paradigm is inherently challenged by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Wang Luo , Haoran Li , Zicheng Zhang , Congying Han , Chi Zhou , Jiayu Lv , Tiande Guo

Preference optimization has emerged as an efficient alternative to online reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for aligning text-to-image diffusion models. However, existing methods largely reduce supervision to binary pairwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Austin Wang , Jiaqi Han , Stefano Ermon , Yisong Yue

This article proposes diffusion LMS strategies for distributed estimation over adaptive networks that are able to exploit sparsity in the underlying system model. The approach relies on convex regularization, common in compressive sensing,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-06-05 Paolo Di Lorenzo , Ali H. Sayed

In high-dimensional state spaces, the usefulness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) is limited by the problem of exploration. This issue has been addressed using potential-based reward shaping (PB-RS) previously. In the present work, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-15 Ingmar Schubert , Ozgur S. Oguz , Marc Toussaint

It is a long-standing challenge to enable an intelligent agent to learn in one environment and generalize to an unseen environment without further data collection and finetuning. In this paper, we consider a zero shot generalization problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Huazhe Xu , Boyuan Chen , Yang Gao , Trevor Darrell

Current reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) pipelines for large language model (LLM) alignment typically assign scalar rewards to sequences, using the final token as a surrogate indicator for the quality of the entire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Ryan Koo , Ian Yang , Vipul Raheja , Mingyi Hong , Kwang-Sung Jun , Dongyeop Kang

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) can acquire complex behaviors from low-level inputs, such as images. However, real-world applications of such methods require generalizing to the vast variability of the real world. Deep networks are known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-13 Chelsea Finn , Tianhe Yu , Justin Fu , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

The aim of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world applications is to create systems capable of making autonomous decisions by learning from their environment through trial and error. This paper emphasizes the importance of reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Sinan Ibrahim , Mostafa Mostafa , Ali Jnadi , Hadi Salloum , Pavel Osinenko

Reward comparisons are vital for evaluating differences in agent behaviors induced by a set of reward functions. Most conventional techniques utilize the input reward functions to learn optimized policies, which are then used to compare…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Clement Nyanhongo , Bruno Miranda Henrique , Eugene Santos

Search-augmented large language models (LLMs) trained with reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved strong results on open-domain question answering (QA), but training still remains a significant challenge. The optimization is often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Yutao Xie , Nathaniel Thomas , Nicklas Hansen , Yang Fu , Li Erran Li , Xiaolong Wang

We propose a novel sparse preference learning/ranking algorithm. Our algorithm approximates the true utility function by a weighted sum of basis functions using the squared loss on pairs of data points, and is a generalization of the kernel…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-07-04 Evgeni Tsivtsivadze , Tom Heskes

Training sample re-weighting is an effective approach for tackling data biases such as imbalanced and corrupted labels. Recent methods develop learning-based algorithms to learn sample re-weighting strategies jointly with model training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-08 Zizhao Zhang , Tomas Pfister

Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of directly aligning diffusion models with human preferences using differentiable reward. However, they exhibit two primary challenges: (1) they rely on multistep denoising with gradient…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Xiangwei Shen , Zhimin Li , Zhantao Yang , Shiyi Zhang , Yingfang Zhang , Donghao Li , Chunyu Wang , Qinglin Lu , Yansong Tang

Reward Models (RMs) are crucial for online alignment of language models (LMs) with human preferences. However, RM-based preference-tuning is vulnerable to reward hacking, whereby LM policies learn undesirable behaviors from flawed RMs. By…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Daniel Fein , Max Lamparth , Violet Xiang , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Nick Haber

Contextual biasing improves automatic speech recognition (ASR) by integrating external knowledge, such as user-specific phrases or entities, during decoding. In this work, we use an attention-based biasing decoder to produce scores for…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-29 Wanting Huang , Weiran Wang

In a discounted reward Markov Decision Process (MDP), the objective is to find the optimal value function, i.e., the value function corresponding to an optimal policy. This problem reduces to solving a functional equation known as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-17 Chandramouli Kamanchi , Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Shalabh Bhatnagar

To overcome the sparse reward challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) for agents based on large language models (LLMs), we propose Mutual Information Self-Evaluation (MISE), an RL paradigm that utilizes hindsight generative self-evaluation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Jiashu Yao , Heyan Huang , Zeming Liu , Yuhang Guo

Direct alignment algorithms have proven an effective step for aligning language models to human-desired behaviors. Current variants of the Direct Preference Optimization objective have focused on a strict setting where all tokens are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Fenia Christopoulou , Ronald Cardenas , Gerasimos Lampouras , Haitham Bou-Ammar , Jun Wang

Large language models are increasingly used for complex reasoning tasks where high-quality offline data such as expert-annotated solutions and distilled reasoning traces are often available. However, in environments with sparse rewards,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Yihao Liu , Shuocheng Li , Lang Cao , Yuhang Xie , Mengyu Zhou , Haoyu Dong , Xiaojun Ma , Shi Han , Dongmei Zhang

In the past decades, we have witnessed significant progress in the domain of autonomous driving. Advanced techniques based on optimization and reinforcement learning (RL) become increasingly powerful at solving the forward problem: given…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Zheng Wu , Liting Sun , Wei Zhan , Chenyu Yang , Masayoshi Tomizuka