English
Related papers

Related papers: Learning to Shape Rewards using a Game of Two Part…

200 papers

Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Cevahir Koprulu , Ufuk Topcu

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

There is a surge of interest in using formal languages such as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) to precisely and succinctly specify complex tasks and derive reward functions for Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, existing methods often assign…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Minjae Kwon , Ingy ElSayed-Aly , Lu Feng

Applying reinforcement learning (RL) to sparse reward domains is notoriously challenging due to insufficient guiding signals. Common RL techniques for addressing such domains include (1) learning from demonstrations and (2) curriculum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-29 Vaibhav Bajaj , Guni Sharon , Peter Stone

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to learn optimal decisions in unknown environments through experience of taking actions and observing the rewards gained. In some cases, the environment is not influenced by the actions of the RL…

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

Many real-world robot learning problems, such as pick-and-place or arriving at a destination, can be seen as a problem of reaching a goal state as soon as possible. These problems, when formulated as episodic reinforcement learning tasks,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-10 Gautham Vasan , Yan Wang , Fahim Shahriar , James Bergstra , Martin Jagersand , A. Rupam Mahmood

We focus on an unloading problem, typical of the logistics sector, modeled as a sequential pick-and-place task. In this type of task, modern machine learning techniques have shown to work better than classic systems since they are more…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Vittorio Giammarino , Andrew J Meyer , Kai Biegun

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

Reinforcement learning (RL) in sparse-reward environments remains a significant challenge due to the lack of informative feedback. We propose a simple yet effective method that uses a small number of successful demonstrations to initialize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Seyed Mahdi Basiri Azad , Joschka Boedecker

This note reconciles two seemingly distinct approaches to policy gradient optimization for the Pass@K objective in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards: (1) direct REINFORCE-style methods, and (2) advantage-shaping techniques that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Christos Thrampoulidis , Sadegh Mahdavi , Wenlong Deng

Reward machines (RMs) inform reinforcement learning agents about the reward structure of the environment. This is particularly advantageous for complex non-Markovian tasks because agents with access to RMs can learn more efficiently from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Kristina Levina , Nikolaos Pappas , Athanasios Karapantelakis , Aneta Vulgarakis Feljan , Jendrik Seipp

Reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly advanced the control of physics-based and robotic characters that track kinematic reference motion. However, methods typically rely on a weighted sum of conflicting reward functions, requiring…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Lucas N. Alegre , Agon Serifi , Ruben Grandia , David Müller , Espen Knoop , Moritz Bächer

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a prevalent and effective methodology for real-world recommender systems, enabling learning policies from historical data and capturing user preferences. In offline RL, reward shaping…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Wenzheng Shu , Yanxiang Zeng , Yongxiang Tang , Teng Sha , Ning Luo , Yanhua Cheng , Xialong Liu , Fan Zhou , Peng Jiang

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have shown strong performance in complex domains such as Atari games, but are often highly sample inefficient. A common approach to reduce interaction time with the environment is to use reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Prasoon Goyal , Scott Niekum , Raymond J. Mooney

Reward models (RMs) have become essential for aligning large language models (LLMs), serving as scalable proxies for human evaluation in both training and inference. However, existing RMs struggle on knowledge-intensive and long-form tasks,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Ziyou Hu , Zhengliang Shi , Minghang Zhu , Haitao Li , Teng Sun , Pengjie Ren , Suzan Verberne , Zhaochun Ren

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successful in training agents in various learning environments, including video-games. However, such work modifies and shrinks the action space from the game's original. This is to avoid trying…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-05-27 Anssi Kanervisto , Christian Scheller , Ville Hautamäki

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

Reward is the driving force for reinforcement-learning agents. This paper is dedicated to understanding the expressivity of reward as a way to capture tasks that we would want an agent to perform. We frame this study around three new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-19 David Abel , Will Dabney , Anna Harutyunyan , Mark K. Ho , Michael L. Littman , Doina Precup , Satinder Singh

We introduce Recursive Agent Optimization (RAO), a reinforcement learning approach for training recursive agents: agents that can spawn and delegate sub-tasks to new instantiations of themselves recursively. Recursive agents implement an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Apurva Gandhi , Satyaki Chakraborty , Xiangjun Wang , Aviral Kumar , Graham Neubig