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Offline reinforcement learning (RL) holds promise as a means to learn high-reward policies from a static dataset, without the need for further environment interactions. However, a key challenge in offline RL lies in effectively stitching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Siddarth Venkatraman , Shivesh Khaitan , Ravi Tej Akella , John Dolan , Jeff Schneider , Glen Berseth

Distilling the tool-using capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into smaller, more efficient small language models (SLMs) is a key challenge for their practical application. The predominant approach, supervised fine-tuning (SFT),…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-29 ChangSu Choi , Hoyun Song , Dongyeon Kim , WooHyeon Jung , Minkyung Cho , Sunjin Park , NohHyeob Bae , Seona Yu , KyungTae Lim

Reinforcement learning provides an automated framework for learning behaviors from high-level reward specifications, but in practice the choice of reward function can be crucial for good results -- while in principle the reward only needs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Abhishek Gupta , Aldo Pacchiano , Yuexiang Zhai , Sham M. Kakade , Sergey Levine

To achieve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL), it necessitates efficiently exploring the underlying environment. Under the offline setting, addressing the exploration challenge lies in collecting an offline dataset with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Shuang Qiu , Jieping Ye , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

One of the main challenges in reinforcement learning is solving tasks with sparse reward. We show that the difficulty of discovering a distant rewarding state in an MDP is bounded by the expected cover time of a random walk over the graph…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-03-19 Yuu Jinnai , Jee Won Park , David Abel , George Konidaris

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is the design of exploration strategies, especially for environments with sparse reward structures and continuous state and action spaces. Intuitively, if the reinforcement signal is very scarce,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Susan Amin , Maziar Gomrokchi , Hossein Aboutalebi , Harsh Satija , Doina Precup

We introduce a class of learning problems where the agent is presented with a series of tasks. Intuitively, if there is relation among those tasks, then the information gained during execution of one task has value for the execution of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-09-06 Christos Dimitrakakis

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a prevalent and effective methodology for real-world recommender systems, enabling learning policies from historical data and capturing user preferences. In offline RL, reward shaping…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Wenzheng Shu , Yanxiang Zeng , Yongxiang Tang , Teng Sha , Ning Luo , Yanhua Cheng , Xialong Liu , Fan Zhou , Peng Jiang

Improving sample efficiency is a key challenge in reinforcement learning, especially in environments with large state spaces and sparse rewards. In literature, this is resolved either through the use of auxiliary tasks (subgoals) or through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Durgesh Kalwar , Omkar Shelke , Somjit Nath , Hardik Meisheri , Harshad Khadilkar

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…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Yiteng Tu , Zhichao Xu , Tao Yang , Weihang Su , Yujia Zhou , Yiqun Liu , Fen Lin , Qin Liu , Qingyao Ai

We propose a multi-agent distributed reinforcement learning algorithm that balances between potentially conflicting short-term reward and sparse, delayed long-term reward, and learns with partial information in a dynamic environment. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-06 Jing Tan , Ramin Khalili , Holger Karl

Reinforcement learning (RL) shows great potential for optimizing multi-vehicle cooperative driving strategies through the state-action-reward feedback loop, but it still faces challenges such as low sample efficiency. This paper proposes a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Ye Han , Lijun Zhang , Dejian Meng , Zhuang Zhang

Single-task RL agents are typically trained under a fixed reward function, which limits their robustness to reward misspecification and their ability to adapt to changing preferences. We introduce Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan , Pieter Abbeel

The aim of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world applications is to create systems capable of making autonomous decisions by learning from their environment through trial and error. This paper emphasizes the importance of reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Sinan Ibrahim , Mostafa Mostafa , Ali Jnadi , Hadi Salloum , Pavel Osinenko

The aim of this paper is to study the reward based policy exploration problem in a supervised learning approach and enable robots to form complex movement trajectories in challenging reward settings and search spaces. For this, the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-10 M. Tuluhan Akbulut , Utku Bozdogan , Ahmet Tekden , Emre Ugur

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Leon Eshuijs , Shihan Wang , Antske Fokkens

Reward shaping is critical in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly for complex tasks where sparse rewards can hinder learning. However, choosing effective shaping rewards from a set of reward functions in a computationally efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Chen Bo Calvin Zhang , Zhang-Wei Hong , Aldo Pacchiano , Pulkit Agrawal

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 this paper we introduce a simple approach for exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) that allows us to develop theoretically justified algorithms in the tabular case but that is also extendable to settings where function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-27 Marlos C. Machado , Marc G. Bellemare , Michael Bowling

Many cooperative multiagent reinforcement learning environments provide agents with a sparse team-based reward, as well as a dense agent-specific reward that incentivizes learning basic skills. Training policies solely on the team-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Shauharda Khadka , Somdeb Majumdar , Santiago Miret , Stephen McAleer , Kagan Tumer