Related papers: Examining average and discounted reward optimality…

State-of-the-art model-based reinforcement learning methods train policies on imagined rollouts. These rollouts are trajectories generated by a learned dynamics model and are scored by a learned reward model, but without querying the true…

This study investigates the mean-variance (MV) trade-off in reinforcement learning (RL), an instance of the sequential decision-making under uncertainty. Our objective is to obtain MV-efficient policies whose means and variances are located…

While deep reinforcement learning has achieved tremendous successes in various applications, most existing works only focus on maximizing the expected value of total return and thus ignore its inherent stochasticity. Such stochasticity is…

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,…

The black-box nature of deep reinforcement learning (RL) hinders them from real-world applications. Therefore, interpreting and explaining RL agents have been active research topics in recent years. Existing methods for post-hoc…

Fairness in classification tasks has traditionally focused on bias removal from neural representations, but recent trends favor algorithmic methods that embed fairness into the training process. These methods steer models towards fair…

Learning to rank (LTR) plays a crucial role in various Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. Although supervised LTR methods based on fine-grained relevance labels (e.g., document-level annotations) have achieved significant success, their…

When applying reinforcement learning (RL) to a new problem, reward engineering is a necessary, but often difficult and error-prone task a system designer has to face. To avoid this step, we propose LR4GPM, a novel (deep) RL method that can…

We consider the reinforcement learning (RL) problem with general utilities which consists in maximizing a function of the state-action occupancy measure. Beyond the standard cumulative reward RL setting, this problem includes as particular…

We study the problem of generalizing an expert agent's behavior, provided through demonstrations, to new environments and/or additional constraints. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) offers a promising solution by seeking to recover the…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables effective learning from previously collected data without exploration, which shows great promise in real-world applications when exploration is expensive or even infeasible. The discount factor,…

Designing optimal controllers continues to be challenging as systems are becoming complex and are inherently nonlinear. The principal advantage of reinforcement learning (RL) is its ability to learn from the interaction with the environment…

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov Decision Processes in which an agent repeatedly interacts with an environment that is modeled by a controlled Markov process. At each time step $t$, it earns a reward, and also incurs a…

This paper explores the application of a reinforcement learning (RL) framework using the Q-Learning algorithm to enhance dynamic pricing strategies in the retail sector. Unlike traditional pricing methods, which often rely on static demand…

Alignment is vital for safely deploying large language models (LLMs). Existing techniques are either reward-based (training a reward model on preference pairs and optimizing with reinforcement learning) or reward-free (directly fine-tuning…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to align large language models (LLMs). Off-policy methods offer greater implementation simplicity and data efficiency than on-policy techniques, but often result in suboptimal performance. In…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven highly effective in aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. Typical RL methods optimize under an overall sequence reward, which can lead to a suboptimal learning process. This…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) often consume excessive tokens, inflating computational cost and latency. More broadly, in goal reaching sequential decision problems we often want to reach the goal quickly, and LRM reasoning can be viewed…

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) is a paradigm in which an RL agent learns to optimize a task using pair-wise preference-based feedback over trajectories, rather than explicit reward signals. While PbRL has demonstrated…

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), it is commonly assumed that an immediate reward signal is generated for each action taken by the agent, helping the agent maximize cumulative rewards to obtain the optimal policy. However, in many real-world…