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In reinforcement learning from human feedback, preference-based reward models play a central role in aligning large language models to human-aligned behavior. However, recent studies show that these models are prone to reward hacking and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Wenqian Ye , Guangtao Zheng , Aidong Zhang

Multi-turn human-AI collaboration is fundamental to deploying interactive services such as adaptive tutoring, conversational recommendation, and professional consultation. However, optimizing these interactions via reinforcement learning is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Haoyu Wang , Yuxin Chen , Liang Luo , Buyun Zhang , Ellie Dingqiao Wen , Pan Li

The growing interest in complex decision-making and language modeling problems highlights the importance of sample-efficient learning over very long horizons. This work takes a step in this direction by investigating contextual linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Yuzhen Qin , Yingcong Li , Fabio Pasqualetti , Maryam Fazel , Samet Oymak

The main challenge in developing effective reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines is often the design and tuning the reward functions. Well-designed shaping reward can lead to significantly faster learning. Naively formulated rewards,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-20 Se Hwan Jeon , Steve Heim , Charles Khazoom , Sangbae Kim

We present a computational framework for synthesis of distributed control strategies for a heterogeneous team of robots in a partially observable environment. The goal is to cooperatively satisfy specifications given as Truncated Linear…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-07 Ningyuan Zhang , Wenliang Liu , Calin Belta

Reinforcement learning combined with sim-to-real transfer offers a general framework for developing locomotion controllers for legged robots. To facilitate successful deployment in the real world, smoothing techniques, such as low-pass…

One of the roadblocks for training generalist robotic models today is heterogeneity. Previous robot learning methods often collect data to train with one specific embodiment for one task, which is expensive and prone to overfitting. This…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Lirui Wang , Xinlei Chen , Jialiang Zhao , Kaiming He

Learning high-performance control policies that remain consistent with expert behavior is a fundamental challenge in robotics. Reinforcement learning can discover high-performing strategies but often departs from desirable human behavior,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Siwei Ju , Jan Tauberschmidt , Oleg Arenz , Peter van Vliet , Jan Peters

Sparse neural networks are becoming increasingly important as the field seeks to improve the performance of existing models by scaling them up, while simultaneously trying to reduce power consumption and computational footprint.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Siddhant M. Jayakumar , Razvan Pascanu , Jack W. Rae , Simon Osindero , Erich Elsen

Option-critic learning is a general-purpose reinforcement learning (RL) framework that aims to address the issue of long term credit assignment by leveraging temporal abstractions. However, when dealing with extended timescales, discounting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Akshay Dharmavaram , Matthew Riemer , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We introduce Self-supervised Online Reward Shaping (SORS), which aims to improve the sample efficiency of any RL algorithm in sparse-reward environments by automatically densifying rewards. The proposed framework alternates between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Farzan Memarian , Wonjoon Goo , Rudolf Lioutikov , Scott Niekum , Ufuk Topcu

Identifying the relevant variables for a classification model with correct confidence levels is a central but difficult task in high-dimension. Despite the core role of sparse logistic regression in statistics and machine learning, it still…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-31 Binh T. Nguyen , Bertrand Thirion , Sylvain Arlot

Learning an optimal policy from a multi-modal reward function is a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Hierarchical RL (HRL) tackles this problem by learning a hierarchical policy, where multiple option policies are in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-01 Takayuki Osa , Masashi Sugiyama

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Meng Cao , Lei Shu , Lei Yu , Yun Zhu , Nevan Wichers , Yinxiao Liu , Lei Meng

We study the Combinatorial Pure Exploration problem with Continuous and Separable reward functions (CPE-CS) in the stochastic multi-armed bandit setting. In a CPE-CS instance, we are given several stochastic arms with unknown distributions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-07 Weiran Huang , Jungseul Ok , Liang Li , Wei Chen

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is a promising approach to solving long-horizon problems with sparse and delayed rewards. Many existing HRL algorithms either use pre-trained low-level skills that are unadaptable, or require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-11 Siyuan Li , Rui Wang , Minxue Tang , Chongjie Zhang

Multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) is commonly considered to suffer from non-stationary environments and exponentially increasing policy space. It would be even more challenging when rewards are sparse and delayed over long…

In this paper, we consider the problem of learning safe policies for probabilistic-constrained reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, a safe policy or controller is one that, with high probability, maintains the trajectory of the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Weiqin Chen , Dharmashankar Subramanian , Santiago Paternain

Exploration with sparse rewards remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Especially for sequential object manipulation tasks, the RL agent always receives negative rewards until completing all sub-tasks, which…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Yongle Luo , Yuxin Wang , Kun Dong , Qiang Zhang , Erkang Cheng , Zhiyong Sun , Bo Song

Reinforcement learning usually uses the feedback rewards of environmental to train agents. But the rewards in the actual environment are sparse, and even some environments will not rewards. Most of the current methods are difficult to get…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-13 Kai Jiang , XiaoLong Qin