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Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective at enhancing the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet underlying mechanisms driving this success remain largely opaque. Our analysis reveals that puzzling…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Haozhe Wang , Qixin Xu , Che Liu , Junhong Wu , Fangzhen Lin , Wenhu Chen

This paper proposes a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework for credit underwriting that tackles ungeneralizable contextual challenges. We adapt RL principles for credit scoring, incorporating action space renewal and multi-choice…

While autonomous vehicles (AVs) may perform remarkably well in generic real-life cases, their irrational action in some unforeseen cases leads to critical safety concerns. This paper introduces the concept of collaborative reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Utku Ayvaz , Chih-Hong Cheng , Hao Shen

The recency heuristic in reinforcement learning is the assumption that stimuli that occurred closer in time to an acquired reward should be more heavily reinforced. The recency heuristic is one of the key assumptions made by TD($\lambda$),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Brett Daley , Marlos C. Machado , Martha White

Reinforcement learning (RL) can be formulated as a sequence modeling problem, where models predict future actions based on historical state-action-reward sequences. Current approaches typically require long trajectory sequences to model the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Hemant Kumawat , Saibal Mukhopadhyay

How much credit (or blame) should an action taken in a state get for a future reward? This is the fundamental temporal credit assignment problem in Reinforcement Learning (RL). One of the earliest and still most widely used heuristics is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Zeyu Zheng , Risto Vuorio , Richard Lewis , Satinder Singh

How do we formalize the challenge of credit assignment in reinforcement learning? Common intuition would draw attention to reward sparsity as a key contributor to difficult credit assignment and traditional heuristics would look to temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-11 Dilip Arumugam , Peter Henderson , Pierre-Luc Bacon

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms can suffer from poor sample efficiency when rewards are delayed and sparse. We introduce a solution that enables agents to learn temporally extended actions at multiple levels of abstraction in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-11 Andrew Levy , Robert Platt , Kate Saenko

The effectiveness of credit assignment in reinforcement learning (RL) when dealing with high-dimensional data is influenced by the success of representation learning via deep neural networks, and has implications for the sample efficiency…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Burcu Küçükoğlu , Sander Dalm , Marcel van Gerven

Multi-human multi-robot teams (MH-MR) obtain tremendous potential in tackling intricate and massive missions by merging distinct strengths and expertise of individual members. The inherent heterogeneity of these teams necessitates advanced…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Ruiqi Wang , Dezhong Zhao , Arjun Gupte , Byung-Cheol Min

Experience replay is an important technique for addressing sample-inefficiency in deep reinforcement learning (RL), but faces difficulty in learning from binary and sparse rewards due to disproportionately few successful experiences in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-10 Sameera Lanka , Tianfu Wu

While large language models excel in diverse domains, their performance on complex longhorizon agentic decision-making tasks remains limited. Most existing methods concentrate on designing effective reward models (RMs) to advance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Zhicong Lu , Zichuan Lin , Wei Jia , Changyuan Tian , Deheng Ye , Peiguang Li , Li Jin , Nayu Liu , Guangluan Xu , Wei Feng

Deep learning has achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning (RL) problems when dense reward function is provided. However, in sparse reward environment it still often suffers from the need to carefully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Hao Liu , Alexander Trott , Richard Socher , Caiming Xiong

The temporal credit assignment problem is a central challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL), concerned with attributing the appropriate influence to each actions in a trajectory for their ability to achieve a goal. However, when feedback…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-20 Eduardo Pignatelli , Johan Ferret , Tim Rockäschel , Edward Grefenstette , Davide Paglieri , Samuel Coward , Laura Toni

We present a multi-agent actor-critic method that aims to implicitly address the credit assignment problem under fully cooperative settings. Our key motivation is that credit assignment among agents may not require an explicit formulation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Meng Zhou , Ziyu Liu , Pengwei Sui , Yixuan Li , Yuk Ying Chung

Dealing with sparse rewards is one of the biggest challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL). We present a novel technique called Hindsight Experience Replay which allows sample-efficient learning from rewards which are sparse and binary and…

Credit assignment in Meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is still poorly understood. Existing methods either neglect credit assignment to pre-adaptation behavior or implement it naively. This leads to poor sample-efficiency during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-14 Jonas Rothfuss , Dennis Lee , Ignasi Clavera , Tamim Asfour , Pieter Abbeel

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

Solving long-horizon goal-conditioned tasks remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) addresses this by decomposing tasks into more manageable sub-tasks, but the automatic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Yang Yu

Value estimation is a critical component of the reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm. The question of how to effectively learn value predictors from data is one of the major problems studied by the RL community, and different approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-22 Arthur Guez , Fabio Viola , Théophane Weber , Lars Buesing , Steven Kapturowski , Doina Precup , David Silver , Nicolas Heess