English
Related papers

Related papers: Replacing Rewards with Examples: Example-Based Pol…

200 papers

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) combines a control problem with statistical estimation: The system dynamics are not known to the agent, but can be learned through experience. A recent line of research casts `RL as inference' and suggests a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-05 Brendan O'Donoghue , Ian Osband , Catalin Ionescu

Unlike the standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) model, many real-world tasks are non-Markovian, whose rewards are predicated on state history rather than solely on the current state. Solving a non-Markovian task, frequently applied in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Ruixuan Miao , Xu Lu , Cong Tian , Bin Yu , Zhenhua Duan

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves final-answer accuracy on reasoning tasks, but it does not reliably improve reasoning quality. Because outcome rewards only assess final answers, they also reward spurious…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Chenlu Ye , Zhou Yu , Ziji Zhang , Hao Chen , Narayanan Sadagopan , Jing Huang , Tong Zhang , Anurag Beniwal

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy that identifies the best action for each state. However, in healthcare settings, many actions may be near-equivalent with respect to the reward (e.g., survival). We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-27 Shengpu Tang , Aditya Modi , Michael W. Sjoding , Jenna Wiens

The ability of reinforcement learning algorithms to learn effective policies is determined by the rewards available during training. However, for practical problems, obtaining large quantities of reward labels is often infeasible due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Shreyas Chaudhari , Renhao Zhang , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

To date, distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) methods have exclusively focused on the discounted setting, where an agent aims to optimize a discounted sum of rewards over time. In this work, we extend distributional RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Juan Sebastian Rojas , Chi-Guhn Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems can be complex and non-interpretable, making it challenging for non-AI experts to understand or intervene in their decisions. This is due in part to the sequential nature of RL in which actions are chosen…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Amal Alabdulkarim , Madhuri Singh , Gennie Mansi , Kaely Hall , Upol Ehsan , Mark O. Riedl

Designing reward functions for continuous-control robotics often leads to subtle misalignments or reward hacking, especially in complex tasks. Preference-based RL mitigates some of these pitfalls by learning rewards from comparative…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Anukriti Singh , Amisha Bhaskar , Peihong Yu , Souradip Chakraborty , Ruthwik Dasyam , Amrit Bedi , Pratap Tokekar

While recent advances have boosted LM proficiency in linguistic benchmarks, LMs consistently struggle to reason correctly on complex tasks like mathematics. We turn to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) as a method with which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-13 Sarah Pan , Vladislav Lialin , Sherin Muckatira , Anna Rumshisky

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 standard reinforcement learning (RL) formulation considers the expectation of the (discounted) cumulative reward. This is limiting in applications where we are concerned with not only the expected performance, but also the distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-13 Changjian Li , Krzysztof Czarnecki

Designing effective reward functions remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), as it often requires extensive human effort and domain expertise. While RL from human feedback has been successful in aligning agents with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Tung Minh Luu , Younghwan Lee , Donghoon Lee , Sunho Kim , Min Jun Kim , Chang D. Yoo

Reinforcement learning (RL) requires access to a reward function that incentivizes the right behavior, but these are notoriously hard to specify for complex tasks. Preference-based RL provides an alternative: learning policies using a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-05 Kimin Lee , Laura Smith , Anca Dragan , Pieter Abbeel

Traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems depend on an exhaustive simulation environment that models real-world physics of the problem and trains the RL agent by observing this environment. In this paper, we present a novel approach…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-09-17 Dattaraj Rao

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to follow instructions with various constraints. Despite the encouraging results, RL improvement inevitably relies on sampling successful, high-quality…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Kongcheng Zhang , Qi Yao , Shunyu Liu , Wenjian Zhang , Min Cen , Yang Zhou , Wenkai Fang , Yiru Zhao , Baisheng Lai , Mingli Song

Although deep reinforcement learning has recently been very successful at learning complex behaviors, it requires a tremendous amount of data to learn a task. One of the fundamental reasons causing this limitation lies in the nature of the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Zhenshan Bing , Alexander Koch , Xiangtong Yao , Kai Huang , Alois Knoll

Reinforcement learning algorithms are defined by their learning update rules, which are typically hand-designed and fixed. We present an evolutionary framework for discovering reinforcement learning algorithms by searching directly over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Alkis Sygkounas , Amy Loutfi , Andreas Persson

Reinforcement learning (RL) presents a promising framework to learn policies through environment interaction, but often requires an infeasible amount of interaction data to solve complex tasks from sparse rewards. One direction includes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Stone Tao , Arth Shukla , Tse-kai Chan , Hao Su