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In reinforcement learning, agents collect state information and rewards through environmental interactions, essential for policy refinement. This process is notably time-consuming, especially in complex robotic simulations and real-world…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Ke Duan , Kai Yang , Houde Liu , Xueqian Wang

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is crucial for their deployment in real-world applications. Recent advancements in Self-Rewarding Language Models suggest that an LLM can use its internal reward models (such as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Xin Zhou , Yiwen Guo , Ruotian Ma , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

We consider a Reinforcement Learning setup where an agent interacts with an environment in observation-reward-action cycles without any (esp.\ MDP) assumptions on the environment. State aggregation and more generally feature reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-07-15 Marcus Hutter

Natural and formal languages provide an effective mechanism for humans to specify instructions and reward functions. We investigate how to generate policies via RL when reward functions are specified in a symbolic language captured by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-24 Andrew C. Li , Zizhao Chen , Pashootan Vaezipoor , Toryn Q. Klassen , Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Sheila A. McIlraith

We introduce missingness-MDPs (miss-MDPs), a novel subclass of partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) that incorporates the theory of missing data. A miss-MDP is a POMDP whose observation function is a missingness function,…

Many real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems necessitate learning complex, temporally extended behavior that may only receive reward signal when the behavior is completed. If the reward-worthy behavior is known, it can be specified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Phillip J. K. Christoffersen , Andrew C. Li , Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Sheila A. McIlraith

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are a natural model for planning problems where effects of actions are nondeterministic and the state of the world is not completely observable. It is difficult to solve POMDPs…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2009-09-25 N. L. Zhang , W. Liu

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have emerged as an effective representation of control policies in sequential decision-making problems. However, a major drawback in the application of RNN-based policies is the difficulty in providing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-02-14 Steven Carr , Nils Jansen , Ufuk Topcu

In real-world scenarios, the observation data for reinforcement learning with continuous control is commonly noisy and part of it may be dynamically missing over time, which violates the assumption of many current methods developed for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-18 Yuhui Wang , Hao He , Xiaoyang Tan

Reinforcement learning (RL) is currently one of the most prominent methods for optimizing dynamical systems, with breakthrough results across various fields. The framework is based on the concept of a Markov decision process (MDP), leading…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-17 Rene Carmona , Mathieu Lauriere

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are used to model environments where the full state cannot be perceived by an agent. As such the agent needs to reason taking into account the past observations and actions. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Raphael Avalos , Florent Delgrange , Ann Nowé , Guillermo A. Pérez , Diederik M. Roijers

Let $p$ denote a generative language model. Let $r$ denote a reward model that returns a scalar that captures the degree at which a draw from $p$ is preferred. The goal of language model alignment is to alter $p$ to a new distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Joy Qiping Yang , Salman Salamatian , Ziteng Sun , Ananda Theertha Suresh , Ahmad Beirami

Many medical decision-making tasks can be framed as partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs). However, prevailing two-stage approaches that first learn a POMDP and then solve it often fail because the model that best fits the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-04-01 Joseph Futoma , Michael C. Hughes , Finale Doshi-Velez

In reinforcement learning, temporal difference-based algorithms can be sample-inefficient: for instance, with sparse rewards, no learning occurs until a reward is observed. This can be remedied by learning richer objects, such as a model of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Léonard Blier , Corentin Tallec , Yann Ollivier

RL with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Current methods rely primarily on policy optimization frameworks like PPO and GRPO, which follow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Haoran He , Yuxiao Ye , Qingpeng Cai , Chen Hu , Binxing Jiao , Daxin Jiang , Ling Pan

We study safe policy improvement (SPI) for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). SPI is an offline reinforcement learning (RL) problem that assumes access to (1) historical data about an environment, and (2) the so-called…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-01-13 Thiago D. Simão , Marnix Suilen , Nils Jansen

We investigate partially observed Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with cost functions regularized by entropy terms describing state, observation, and control uncertainty. Standard POMDP techniques are shown to offer bounded-error…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-05-10 Timothy L. Molloy , Girish N. Nair

Training language models to produce both correct answers and sound reasoning remains an open challenge. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards typically optimizes only final outcomes, which can lead to a failure mode where task…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Kyuyoung Kim , Kevin Wang , Yunfei Xie , Peiyang Xu , Peiyao Sheng , Chen Wei , Zhangyang Wang , Jinwoo Shin , Pramod Viswanath , Sewoong Oh

Reinforcement learning with human feedback for aligning large language models (LLMs) trains a reward model typically using ranking loss with comparison pairs.However, the training procedure suffers from an inherent problem: the uncontrolled…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Hang Zhou , Chenglong Wang , Yimin Hu , Tong Xiao , Chunliang Zhang , Jingbo Zhu

We consider an agent interacting with an environment in a single stream of actions, observations, and rewards, with no reset. This process is not assumed to be a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Rather, the agent has several representations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-03-19 Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Phuong Nguyen , Ronald Ortner , Daniil Ryabko