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Multi-agent reinforcement learning has drawn increasing attention in practice, e.g., robotics and automatic driving, as it can explore optimal policies using samples generated by interacting with the environment. However, high reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Jifeng Hu , Yanchao Sun , Hechang Chen , Sili Huang , haiyin piao , Yi Chang , Lichao Sun

One major limitation to the applicability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to many practical domains is the large number of samples required to learn an optimal policy. To address this problem and improve learning efficiency, we consider a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-07 Roberto Cipollone , Giuseppe De Giacomo , Marco Favorito , Luca Iocchi , Fabio Patrizi

Controlled text generation tasks such as unsupervised text style transfer have increasingly adopted the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL). A major challenge in applying RL to such tasks is the sparse reward, which is available only after…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-19 Bhargav Upadhyay , Akhilesh Sudhakar , Arjun Maheswaran

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate transformative potential, yet their reasoning remains inconsistent and unreliable. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning is a key mechanism for improvement, but its effectiveness is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Pei-Chi Pan , Yingbin Liang , Sen Lin

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

Designing dense rewards is crucial for reinforcement learning (RL), yet in robotics it often demands extensive manual effort and lacks scalability. One promising solution is to view task progress as a dense reward signal, as it quantifies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Yuyang Liu , Chuan Wen , Yihang Hu , Dinesh Jayaraman , Yang Gao

Reinforcement learning fine-tuning has become the dominant approach for aligning diffusion models with human preferences. However, assessing images is intrinsically a multi-dimensional task, and multiple evaluation criteria need to be…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Canyu Zhao , Hao Chen , Yunze Tong , Yu Qiao , Jiacheng Li , Chunhua Shen

Designing dense reward functions is pivotal for efficient robotic Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, most dense rewards rely on manual engineering, which fundamentally limits the scalability and automation of reinforcement learning.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Xunlan Zhou , Xuanlin Chen , Shaowei Zhang , ShengHua Wan , Xiaohai Hu , Lei Yuan , De-chuan Zhan

We propose a large language model based reward decomposition framework for aligning dialogue agents using only a single session-level feedback signal. We leverage the reasoning capabilities of a frozen, pretrained large language model (LLM)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Dong Won Lee , Hae Won Park , Cynthia Breazeal , Louis-Philippe Morency

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for robotic path planning in uncertain environments. However, the control policies trained for an RL agent crucially depend on user-defined, state-based reward functions. Poorly designed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Anand Balakrishnan , Stefan Jakšić , Edgar A. Aguilar , Dejan Ničković , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

The sequential nature of decision-making in financial asset trading aligns naturally with the reinforcement learning (RL) framework, making RL a common approach in this domain. However, the low signal-to-noise ratio in financial markets…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-14 Sven Goluža , Tomislav Kovačević , Stjepan Begušić , Zvonko Kostanjčar

When learning task-oriented dialogue (ToD) agents, reinforcement learning (RL) techniques can naturally be utilized to train dialogue strategies to achieve user-specific goals. Prior works mainly focus on adopting advanced RL techniques to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Yihao Feng , Shentao Yang , Shujian Zhang , Jianguo Zhang , Caiming Xiong , Mingyuan Zhou , Huan Wang

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents can often be difficult, involving meticulous design of reward functions that are sufficiently informative yet easy enough to provide. Human-in-the-loop RL methods allow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Kimin Lee , Laura Smith , Pieter Abbeel

Reward models have become a staple in modern NLP, serving as not only a scalable text evaluator, but also an indispensable component in many alignment recipes and inference-time algorithms. However, while recent reward models increase…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Zhaofeng Wu , Michihiro Yasunaga , Andrew Cohen , Yoon Kim , Asli Celikyilmaz , Marjan Ghazvininejad

Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential for optimizing multi-vehicle cooperative driving strategies through the state-action-reward feedback loop, but it still faces challenges such as low sample efficiency. This paper proposes a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Ye Han , Lijun Zhang , Dejian Meng , Zhuang Zhang

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shifted the post-training paradigm from traditional instruction tuning and human preference alignment toward reinforcement learning (RL) focused on reasoning capabilities. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Qianxi He , Qingyu Ren , Shanzhe Lei , Xuhong Wang , Yingchun Wang

Dialogue policy learning for task-oriented dialogue systems has enjoyed great progress recently mostly through employing reinforcement learning methods. However, these approaches have become very sophisticated. It is time to re-evaluate it.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-22 Ziming Li , Julia Kiseleva , Maarten de Rijke

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in automating scientific ideation, yet current approaches relying on iterative prompting or complex multi-agent architectures often suffer from hallucination or computational…

Reinforcement learning (RL), a common tool in decision making, learns control policies from various experiences based on the associated cumulative return/rewards without treating them differently. Humans, on the contrary, often learn to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

Rewards serve as a measure of user satisfaction and act as a limiting factor in interactive recommender systems. In this research, we focus on the problem of learning to reward (LTR), which is fundamental to reinforcement learning. Previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Jialin Liu , Xinyan Su , Zeyu He , Xiangyu Zhao , Jun Li