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Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for robotic path planning in uncertain environments. However, the control policies trained for an RL agent crucially depend on user-defined, state-based reward functions. Poorly designed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Anand Balakrishnan , Stefan Jakšić , Edgar A. Aguilar , Dejan Ničković , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

A significant challenge for the practical application of reinforcement learning in the real world is the need to specify an oracle reward function that correctly defines a task. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to avoid this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-16 Kelvin Xu , Ellis Ratner , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) provides a framework to train AI agents using human feedback through preferences over pairs of behaviors, enabling agents to learn desired behaviors when it is difficult to specify a numerical…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-03-21 David Chhan , Ellen Novoseller , Vernon J. Lawhern

Interactive recommendation aims to learn from dynamic interactions between items and users to achieve responsiveness and accuracy. Reinforcement learning is inherently advantageous for coping with dynamic environments and thus has attracted…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Xiaocong Chen , Chaoran Huang , Lina Yao , Xianzhi Wang , Wei Liu , Wenjie Zhang

Learning effective representations in image-based environments is crucial for sample efficient Reinforcement Learning (RL). Unfortunately, in RL, representation learning is confounded with the exploratory experience of the agent -- learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-21 Denis Yarats , Rob Fergus , Alessandro Lazaric , Lerrel Pinto

In recent years, data-driven reinforcement learning (RL), also known as offline RL, have gained significant attention. However, the role of data sampling techniques in offline RL has been overlooked despite its potential to enhance online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-24 Jinyi Liu , Yi Ma , Jianye Hao , Yujing Hu , Yan Zheng , Tangjie Lv , Changjie Fan

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in real-world decision-making across diverse domains, including gaming, robotics, online advertising, public health, and natural language processing. Despite these advances, a…

Applications · Statistics 2026-01-23 Asim H. Gazi , Yongyi Guo , Daiqi Gao , Ziping Xu , Kelly W. Zhang , Susan A. Murphy

Online advertising in recommendation platforms has gained significant attention, with a predominant focus on channel recommendation and budget allocation strategies. However, current offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods face…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Langming Liu , Wanyu Wang , Chi Zhang , Bo Li , Hongzhi Yin , Xuetao Wei , Wenbo Su , Bo Zheng , Xiangyu Zhao

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) -- the problem of learning reward functions from demonstrations of an \emph{expert policy} -- plays a critical role in developing intelligent systems. While widely used in applications, theoretical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-13 Lei Zhao , Mengdi Wang , Yu Bai

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise as a tool for engineering safe, ethical, or legal behaviour in autonomous agents. Its use typically relies on assigning punishments to state-action pairs that constitute unsafe or unethical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-20 Emery Neufeld

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a promising paradigm for optimizing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) in complex reasoning tasks. However, traditional outcome-based RL approaches often suffer from reward sparsity and inefficient…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Zhao Wang , Ziliang Zhao , Zhicheng Dou

Reinforcement Learning has suffered from poor reward specification, and issues for reward hacking even in simple enough domains. Preference Based Reinforcement Learning attempts to solve the issue by utilizing binary feedbacks on queried…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-20 Mudit Verma , Subbarao Kambhampati

Personalized retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) aims to produce user-tailored responses by incorporating retrieved user profiles alongside the input query. Existing methods primarily focus on improving retrieval and rely on large language…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Kepu Zhang , Teng Shi , Weijie Yu , Jun Xu

In sequential decision-making problems, Return-Conditioned Supervised Learning (RCSL) has gained increasing recognition for its simplicity and stability in modern decision-making tasks. Unlike traditional offline reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Zhishuai Liu , Yu Yang , Ruhan Wang , Pan Xu , Dongruo Zhou

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a key paradigm for aligning and optimizing large language models (LLMs). Standard approaches treat the LLM as the policy and apply RL directly over the full vocabulary space. However, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Jing-Cheng Pang , Liang Lu , Xian Tang , Kun Jiang , Sijie Wu , Kai Zhang , Xubin Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that users specify tasks by manually writing down a reward function. However, this process can be laborious and demands considerable technical expertise. Can we devise RL algorithms that instead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Developments in reinforcement learning (RL) have allowed algorithms to achieve impressive performance in highly complex, but largely static problems. In contrast, biological learning seems to value efficiency of adaptation to a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Eric Chalmers , Artur Luczak

Online reinforcement learning (RL) excels in complex, safety-critical domains but suffers from sample inefficiency, training instability, and limited interpretability. Data attribution provides a principled way to trace model behavior back…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Yuzheng Hu , Fan Wu , Haotian Ye , David Forsyth , James Zou , Nan Jiang , Jiaqi W. Ma , Han Zhao

Deep Research agents tackle knowledge-intensive tasks through multi-round retrieval and decision-oriented generation. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been shown to improve performance in this paradigm, its contributions remain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yinuo Xu , Shuo Lu , Jianjie Cheng , Meng Wang , Qianlong Xie , Xingxing Wang , Ran He , Jian Liang

We introduce Prompt Curriculum Learning (PCL), a lightweight reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that selects intermediate-difficulty prompts using a learned value model to post-train language models. Since post-training LLMs via RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Zhaolin Gao , Joongwon Kim , Wen Sun , Thorsten Joachims , Sid Wang , Richard Yuanzhe Pang , Liang Tan