English
Related papers

Related papers: Rewards Encoding Environment Dynamics Improves Pre…

200 papers

We study reinforcement learning from human feedback in general Markov decision processes, where agents learn from trajectory-level preference comparisons. A central challenge in this setting is to design algorithms that select informative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Reda Ouhamma , Maryam Kamgarpour

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have emerged as a popular choice for training an efficient and effective dialogue policy. However, these methods suffer from sparse and unstable reward signals returned by a user simulator only when a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-18 Ziming Li , Sungjin Lee , Baolin Peng , Jinchao Li , Julia Kiseleva , Maarten de Rijke , Shahin Shayandeh , Jianfeng Gao

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides a natural way to align RL agents' behavior with human desired outcomes, but is often restrained by costly human feedback. To improve feedback efficiency, most existing PbRL methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Xiao Hu , Jianxiong Li , Xianyuan Zhan , Qing-Shan Jia , Ya-Qin Zhang

Reward machines (RMs) provide a structured way to specify non-Markovian rewards in reinforcement learning (RL), thereby improving both expressiveness and programmability. Viewed more broadly, they separate what is known about the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Daniel Ajeleye , Ashutosh Trivedi , Majid Zamani

Reinforcement learning has become the central approach for language models (LMs) to learn from environmental reward or feedback. In practice, the environmental feedback is usually sparse and delayed. Learning from such signals is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Taiwei Shi , Sihao Chen , Bowen Jiang , Linxin Song , Longqi Yang , Jieyu Zhao

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a computational approach to reward-driven learning in sequential decision problems. It implements the discovery of optimal actions by learning from an agent interacting with an environment rather than from…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-06 Mauricio Tec , Yunshan Duan , Peter Müller

Reinforcement learning (RL) -- algorithms that teach artificial agents to interact with environments by maximising reward signals -- has achieved significant success in recent years. These successes have been facilitated by advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Llewyn Salt , Marcus Gallagher

Reinforcement learning (RL) requires skillful definition and remarkable computational efforts to solve optimization and control problems, which could impair its prospect. Introducing human guidance into reinforcement learning is a promising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-30 Jingda Wu , Zhiyu Huang , Wenhui Huang , Chen Lv

In preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), a reward function is learned from a type of human feedback called preference. To expedite preference collection, recent works have leveraged \emph{offline preferences}, which are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Guoxi Zhang , Han Bao , Hisashi Kashima

In this paper we consider self-supervised representation learning to improve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL). We propose a forward prediction objective for simultaneously learning embeddings of states and action sequences.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-15 William Whitney , Rajat Agarwal , Kyunghyun Cho , Abhinav Gupta

Offline reinforcement learning has become one of the most practical RL settings. However, most existing works on offline RL focus on the standard setting with scalar reward feedback. It remains unknown how to universally transfer the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Yinglun Xu , David Zhu , Rohan Gumaste , Gagandeep Singh

Reward function design and exploration time are arguably the biggest obstacles to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real world. In many real-world tasks, designing a reward function takes considerable hand…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-06-14 Pierre Sermanet , Kelvin Xu , Sergey Levine

Single-trajectory reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim to optimize policies from datasets consisting of (prompt, response, reward) triplets, where scalar rewards are directly available. This supervision format is highly practical, as it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Bilal Faye , Hanane Azzag , Mustapha Lebbah

Reward design is a fundamental, yet challenging aspect of reinforcement learning (RL). Researchers typically utilize feedback signals from the environment to handcraft a reward function, but this process is not always effective due to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Alexander Bukharin , Yixiao Li , Pengcheng He , Tuo Zhao

Humans are masters at quickly learning many complex tasks, relying on an approximate understanding of the dynamics of their environments. In much the same way, we would like our learning agents to quickly adapt to new tasks. In this paper,…

In the field of legged robot motion control, reinforcement learning (RL) holds great promise but faces two major challenges: high computational cost for training individual robots and poor generalization of trained models. To address these…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Haodong Huang , Shilong Sun , Zida Zhao , Hailin Huang , Changqing Shen , Wenfu Xu

We address the problem of making a pre-trained reinforcement learning (RL) policy safety-aware by incorporating cost constraints without retraining it from scratch. While costs could be numerically encoded, we assume a more general setting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Richa Verma , Bavish Kulur , Sanjay Chawla , Balaraman Ravindran

Reward learning enables the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to tasks where reward is defined by human judgment, building a model of reward by asking humans questions. Most work on reward learning has used simulated environments,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Daniel M. Ziegler , Nisan Stiennon , Jeffrey Wu , Tom B. Brown , Alec Radford , Dario Amodei , Paul Christiano , Geoffrey Irving

While recent progress in deep reinforcement learning has enabled robots to learn complex behaviors, tasks with long horizons and sparse rewards remain an ongoing challenge. In this work, we propose an effective reward shaping method through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Xingyu Lu , Stas Tiomkin , Pieter Abbeel

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Lianghuan Huang , Sagnik Anupam , Insup Lee , Shuo Li , Osbert Bastani