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The goal of reinforcement learning algorithms is to estimate and/or optimise the value function. However, unlike supervised learning, no teacher or oracle is available to provide the true value function. Instead, the majority of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-25 Zhongwen Xu , Hado van Hasselt , David Silver

Uncertainty is ubiquitous in games, both in the agents playing games and often in the games themselves. Working with uncertainty is therefore an important component of successful deep reinforcement learning agents. While there has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-22 Owen Lockwood , Mei Si

Reinforcement learning (RL) research focuses on general solutions that can be applied across different domains. This results in methods that RL practitioners can use in almost any domain. However, recent studies often lack the engineering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-05 Anssi Kanervisto , Christian Scheller , Yanick Schraner , Ville Hautamäki

Reward functions are central in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding agents towards optimal decision-making. The complexity of RL tasks requires meticulously designed reward functions that effectively drive learning while avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Rati Devidze

Reinforcement learning (RL) has transformed sequential decision making, yet traditional algorithms like Deep Q-Networks (DQNs) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) often struggle with efficient exploration, stability, and adaptability in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Umberto Gonçalves de Sousa

Reward hacking arises when a model improves a proxy reward by exploiting shortcuts rather than solving the intended task. We study this failure mode through the geometry of reinforcement learning updates in language models and argue that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Wenlong Deng , Jiaji Huang , Kaan Ozkara , Yushu Li , Christos Thrampoulidis , Xiaoxiao Li , Youngsuk Park

Deep Reinforcement Learning has enabled the learning of policies for complex tasks in partially observable environments, without explicitly learning the underlying model of the tasks. While such model-free methods achieve considerable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-11 Tanmay Shankar , Santosha K. Dwivedy , Prithwijit Guha

We study a class of reinforcement learning problems where the reward signals for policy learning are generated by an internal reward model that is dependent on and jointly optimized with the policy. This interdependence between the policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Mengdi Li , Xufeng Zhao , Jae Hee Lee , Cornelius Weber , Stefan Wermter

Reinforcement learning has enabled agents to solve challenging tasks in unknown environments. However, manually crafting reward functions can be time consuming, expensive, and error prone to human error. Competing objectives have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-11 Brendon Matusch , Jimmy Ba , Danijar Hafner

Though significant advancements have been achieved in developing long-context large language models (LLMs), the compromised quality of LLM-synthesized data for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often affects the long-context performance of SFT…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Jiajie Zhang , Zhongni Hou , Xin Lv , Shulin Cao , Zhenyu Hou , Yilin Niu , Lei Hou , Yuxiao Dong , Ling Feng , Juanzi Li

In this work, we build on recent advances in distributional reinforcement learning to give a generally applicable, flexible, and state-of-the-art distributional variant of DQN. We achieve this by using quantile regression to approximate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-20 Will Dabney , Georg Ostrovski , David Silver , Rémi Munos

Reward-based fine-tuning steers a pretrained diffusion or flow-based generative model toward higher-reward samples while remaining close to the pretrained model. Although existing methods are derived from different perspectives, we show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Jeongjae Lee , Jinho Chang , Jeongsol Kim , Jong Chul Ye

Reward shaping is a technique in reinforcement learning that addresses the sparse-reward problem by providing more frequent and informative rewards. We introduce a self-adaptive and highly efficient reward shaping mechanism that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Haozhe Ma , Zhengding Luo , Thanh Vinh Vo , Kuankuan Sima , Tze-Yun Leong

Text-based games are a popular testbed for language-based reinforcement learning (RL). In previous work, deep Q-learning is commonly used as the learning agent. Q-learning algorithms are challenging to apply to complex real-world domains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Weichen Li , Rati Devidze , Sophie Fellenz

In this paper, dynamic non-cooperative coexistence between a cognitive pulsed radar and a nearby communications system is addressed by applying nonlinear value function approximation via deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL) to develop a…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-08-28 Charles E. Thornton , Mark A. Kozy , R. Michael Buehrer , Anthony F. Martone , Kelly D. Sherbondy

Sparse-reward domains are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms since significant exploration is needed before encountering reward for the first time. Hierarchical reinforcement learning can facilitate exploration by reducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-13 Lorenzo Steccanella , Simone Totaro , Damien Allonsius , Anders Jonsson

Reinforcement learning involves agents interacting with an environment to complete tasks. When rewards provided by the environment are sparse, agents may not receive immediate feedback on the quality of actions that they take, thereby…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Baicen Xiao , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Radha Poovendran

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have great potential for energy-efficient implementation of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on dedicated neuromorphic hardware. Recent studies demonstrated competitive performance of SNNs compared with DNNs on…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-12-24 Weihao Tan , Devdhar Patel , Robert Kozma

Frontier models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities following the integration of task-reward-based reinforcement learning (RL) into their training pipelines, enabling systems to evolve from pure reasoning models into sophisticated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Sarthak Mittal , Leo Gagnon , Guillaume Lajoie

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, a collection of agents learns to interact in a shared environment to achieve a common goal. We propose the use of reward machines (RM) -- Mealy machines used as structured representations…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Cyrus Neary , Zhe Xu , Bo Wu , Ufuk Topcu