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The most data-efficient algorithms for reinforcement learning in robotics are model-based policy search algorithms, which alternate between learning a dynamical model of the robot and optimizing a policy to maximize the expected return…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-05 Rituraj Kaushik , Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis , Jean-Baptiste Mouret

We study how to exploit dense simulator-defined rewards in vision-based autonomous driving without inheriting their misalignment with deployment metrics. In realistic simulators such as CARLA, privileged state (e.g., lane geometry,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Feeza Khan Khanzada , Jaerock Kwon

The automatic synthesis of policies for robotic-control tasks through reinforcement learning relies on a reward signal that simultaneously captures many possibly conflicting requirements. In this paper, we in\-tro\-duce a novel,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Luigi Berducci , Edgar A. Aguilar , Dejan Ničković , Radu Grosu

The goal of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is to infer a reward function that explains the behavior of an agent performing a task. The assumption that most approaches make is that the demonstrated behavior is near-optimal. In many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Luis Haug , Ivan Ovinnikov , Eugene Bykovets

The efficient Test-Time Scaling (TTS) paradigm offers a promising perspective for enhancing the generation performance of diffusion models. However, current solutions are limited to a static, pre-defined noise pool and suffer from…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Gang Dai , Yining Huang , Yiming Xia , Guohao Chen , Shuaicheng Niu

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in text-to-image generation. However, their practical applications are hindered by the misalignment between generated images and corresponding text prompts. To tackle this issue,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-28 Zijing Hu , Fengda Zhang , Long Chen , Kun Kuang , Jiahui Li , Kaifeng Gao , Jun Xiao , Xin Wang , Wenwu Zhu

In multi-agent environments, agents often struggle to learn optimal policies due to sparse or delayed global rewards, particularly in long-horizon tasks where it is challenging to evaluate actions at intermediate time steps. We introduce…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-12-20 Aditya Kapoor , Sushant Swamy , Kale-ab Tessera , Mayank Baranwal , Mingfei Sun , Harshad Khadilkar , Stefano V. Albrecht

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Simone Parisi , Davide Tateo , Maximilian Hensel , Carlo D'Eramo , Jan Peters , Joni Pajarinen

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has catalyzed significant breakthroughs in complex LLM reasoning within verifiable domains, such as mathematics and programming. Recent efforts have sought to extend this paradigm to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Zheng Zhang , Ao Lu , Yuanhao Zeng , Ziwei Shan , Jinjin Guo , Lufei Li , Yexin Li , Kan Ren

The post-training pipeline for diffusion models currently has two stages: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on curated data and reinforcement learning (RL) with reward models. A fundamental gap separates them. SFT optimizes the denoiser only on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 You Qin , Linqing Wang , Hao Fei , Roger Zimmermann , Liefeng Bo , Qinglin Lu , Chunyu Wang

We study offline reinforcement learning in average-reward MDPs, which presents increased challenges from the perspectives of distribution shift and non-uniform coverage, and has been relatively underexamined from a theoretical perspective.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Matthew Zurek , Guy Zamir , Yudong Chen

Deep reinforcement learning has proven remarkably useful in training agents from unstructured data. However, the opacity of the produced agents makes it difficult to ensure that they adhere to various requirements posed by human engineers.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Raz Yerushalmi , Guy Amir , Achiya Elyasaf , David Harel , Guy Katz , Assaf Marron

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for unlocking reasoning capabilities in language models. However, relying on sparse rewards makes this process highly sample-inefficient, as models must navigate vast search spaces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Ilia Mahrooghi , Aryo Lotfi , Emmanuel Abbe

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

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn a policy that maximizes the expected return using a given static dataset of transitions. However, offline RL faces the distribution shift problem. The policy constraint offline RL method is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Yuanhao Chen , Qi Liu , Pengbin Chen , Zhongjian Qiao , Yanjie Li

Safe policy improvement (SPI) offers theoretical control over policy updates, yet existing guarantees largely concern offline, tabular reinforcement learning (RL). We study SPI in general online settings, when combined with world model and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Florent Delgrange , Raphael Avalos , Willem Röpke

Sparse rewards pose a significant challenge to achieving high sample efficiency in goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, in sequential manipulation tasks, the agent receives failure rewards until it successfully…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Yuming Huang , Bin Ren , Ziming Xu , Lianghong Wu

Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) models are vulnerable in various noisy scenarios. For instance, the observed reward channel is often subject to noise in practice (e.g., when rewards are collected through sensors),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-04 Jingkang Wang , Yang Liu , Bo Li

The alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) utilizes Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) for non-verifiable domains such as long-form question answering and open-ended instruction following. These domains often rely on LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Nirmal Patel , Fei Wang , Inderjit S. Dhillon

Diffusion models have emerged as powerful generative tools across various domains, yet tailoring pre-trained models to exhibit specific desirable properties remains challenging. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Fengyuan Dai , Zifeng Zhuang , Yufei Huang , Siteng Huang , Bangyan Liao , Donglin Wang , Fajie Yuan