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Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown to be a valuable tool in training neural networks for autonomous motion planning. The application of RL to a specific problem is dependent on a reward signal to quantify how good or bad a certain action…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Benjamin Evans , Herman A. Engelbrecht , Hendrik W. Jordaan

One obstacle to applying reinforcement learning algorithms to real-world problems is the lack of suitable reward functions. Designing such reward functions is difficult in part because the user only has an implicit understanding of the task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Jan Leike , David Krueger , Tom Everitt , Miljan Martic , Vishal Maini , Shane Legg

No real-world reward function is perfect. Sensory errors and software bugs may result in RL agents observing higher (or lower) rewards than they should. For example, a reinforcement learning agent may prefer states where a sensory error…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-08-22 Tom Everitt , Victoria Krakovna , Laurent Orseau , Marcus Hutter , Shane Legg

When a person is not satisfied with how a robot performs a task, they can intervene to correct it. Reward learning methods enable the robot to adapt its reward function online based on such human input, but they rely on handcrafted…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-01-13 Andreea Bobu , Marius Wiggert , Claire Tomlin , Anca D. Dragan

We introduce Reward-Zero, a general-purpose implicit reward mechanism that transforms natural-language task descriptions into dense, semantically grounded progress signals for reinforcement learning (RL). Reward-Zero serves as a simple yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Heng Zhang , Haddy Alchaer , Arash Ajoudani , Yu She

Reward shaping is an effective technique for incorporating domain knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as potential-based reward shaping normally make full use of a given shaping reward function. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-06 Yujing Hu , Weixun Wang , Hangtian Jia , Yixiang Wang , Yingfeng Chen , Jianye Hao , Feng Wu , Changjie Fan

Multi-agent hierarchical reinforcement learning (MAHRL) has been studied as an effective means to solve intelligent decision problems in complex and large-scale environments. However, most current MAHRL algorithms follow the traditional way…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Chanjuan Liu , Jinmiao Cong , Bingcai Chen , Yaochu Jin , Enqiang Zhu

Time-series reasoning remains a significant challenge in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) due to the dynamic temporal patterns, ambiguous semantics, and lack of temporal priors. In this work, we introduce TimeMaster, a reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Junru Zhang , Lang Feng , Xu Guo , Yuhan Wu , Yabo Dong , Duanqing Xu

Collecting high-quality preference datasets for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is resource-intensive and challenging. As a result, researchers often train reward models on extensive offline datasets which aggregate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Shambhavi Krishna , Aishwarya Sahoo

Reward modeling is essential for aligning large language models with human preferences through reinforcement learning. To provide accurate reward signals, a reward model (RM) should stimulate deep thinking and conduct interpretable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Xiusi Chen , Gaotang Li , Ziqi Wang , Bowen Jin , Cheng Qian , Yu Wang , Hongru Wang , Yu Zhang , Denghui Zhang , Tong Zhang , Hanghang Tong , Heng Ji

This paper presents an interpretable reward design framework for reinforcement learning based constrained optimal control problems with state and terminal constraints. The problem is formalized within a standard partially observable Markov…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-05 Jingjie Ni , Fangfei Li , Xin Jin , Xianlun Peng , Yang Tang

Reward function, as an incentive representation that recognizes humans' agency and rationalizes humans' actions, is particularly appealing for modeling human behavior in human-robot interaction. Inverse Reinforcement Learning is an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Ran Tian , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Liting Sun

Reward learning enables robots to learn adaptable behaviors from human input. Traditional methods model the reward as a linear function of hand-crafted features, but that requires specifying all the relevant features a priori, which is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Andreea Bobu , Marius Wiggert , Claire Tomlin , Anca D. Dragan

Incorporating high-level knowledge is an effective way to expedite reinforcement learning (RL), especially for complex tasks with sparse rewards. We investigate an RL problem where the high-level knowledge is in the form of reward machines,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Zhe Xu , Ivan Gavran , Yousef Ahmad , Rupak Majumdar , Daniel Neider , Ufuk Topcu , Bo Wu

Multi-task representation learning (MTRL) is an approach that learns shared latent representations across related tasks, facilitating collaborative learning that improves the overall learning efficiency. This paper studies MTRL for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yaoze Guo , Shana Moothedath

Inferring reward functions from demonstrations and pairwise preferences are auspicious approaches for aligning Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents with human intentions. However, state-of-the art methods typically focus on learning a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Markus Peschl , Arkady Zgonnikov , Frans A. Oliehoek , Luciano C. Siebert

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…

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) has gained much attention for its ability to learn complex behaviors in a sample-efficient way: planning actions by generating imaginary trajectories with predicted rewards. Despite its success, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Vint Lee , Pieter Abbeel , Youngwoon Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently become the dominant paradigm for strengthening the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Yet the rule-based reward functions commonly used on mathematical or programming benchmarks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Haoyang He , Zihua Rong , Kun Ji , Chenyang Li , Qing Huang , Chong Xia , Lan Yang , Honggang Zhang

Large language models are typically aligned with human preferences by optimizing $\textit{reward models}$ (RMs) fitted to human feedback. However, human preferences are multi-faceted, and it is increasingly common to derive reward from a…