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This thesis develops theoretical frameworks and algorithms that advance constrained reinforcement learning (RL) across control, preference learning, and alignment of large language models. The first contribution addresses constrained Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Akhil Agnihotri

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Evan Zheran Liu , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Tianlin Shi , Percy Liang

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous time and study the problem of achieving the best trade-off between exploration of a black box environment and exploitation of current knowledge. We propose an entropy-regularized reward…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-14 Haoran Wang , Thaleia Zariphopoulou , Xunyu Zhou

Adversarial self-play in two-player games has delivered impressive results when used with reinforcement learning algorithms that combine deep neural networks and tree search. Algorithms like AlphaZero and Expert Iteration learn tabula-rasa,…

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) agents never intelligently explore like a human (i.e. taking into account complex domain priors and adapting quickly based on previous exploration). Across episodes, RL agents struggle to perform even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Ben Norman , Jeff Clune

Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) often faces significant issues such as constraint violations and instability, necessitating the use of constrained policy optimization, which seeks optimal policies while ensuring adherence to specific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Ning Yang , Pengyu Wang , Guoqing Liu , Haifeng Zhang , Pin Lv , Jun Wang

In the realm of multi-agent reinforcement learning, intrinsic motivations have emerged as a pivotal tool for exploration. While the computation of many intrinsic rewards relies on estimating variational posteriors using neural network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Chenghao Li , Tonghan Wang , Chongjie Zhang , Qianchuan Zhao

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have led to recent successes in solving complex games, such as Atari or Starcraft, and to a huge impact in real-world applications, such as cybersecurity or autonomous driving. In the side of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Rubén Majadas , Javier García , Fernando Fernández

Consider the problem of exploration in sparse-reward or reward-free environments, such as in Montezuma's Revenge. In the curiosity-driven paradigm, the agent is rewarded for how much each realized outcome differs from their predicted…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-21 Daniel Jarrett , Corentin Tallec , Florent Altché , Thomas Mesnard , Rémi Munos , Michal Valko

Reward design is a critical part of the application of reinforcement learning, the performance of which strongly depends on how well the reward signal frames the goal of the designer and how well the signal assesses progress in reaching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Yixiang Wang , Yujing Hu , Feng Wu , Yingfeng Chen

We introduce Adversarial Policy Optimization (AdvPO), a novel solution to the pervasive issue of reward over-optimization in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) for Large Language Models (LLMs). Over-optimization occurs when a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-10 Xiaoying Zhang , Jean-Francois Ton , Wei Shen , Hongning Wang , Yang Liu

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

This paper reviews exploration techniques in deep reinforcement learning. Exploration techniques are of primary importance when solving sparse reward problems. In sparse reward problems, the reward is rare, which means that the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Pawel Ladosz , Lilian Weng , Minwoo Kim , Hyondong Oh

Despite Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) dominating policy gradient methods -- from robotic control to game AI -- its static trust region forces a brittle trade-off: aggressive clipping stifles early exploration, while late-stage updates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Ben Rahman

The emergence of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has propelled the development of autonomous agents that operate on Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) using pure visual input. A fundamental challenge is robustly grounding natural…

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for decision processes with non-Markovian reward, in which high-level knowledge of the task in the form of reward machines is available to the learner. We consider probabilistic reward machines with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Hippolyte Bourel , Anders Jonsson , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Chenxiao Ma , Mohammad Sadegh Talebi

Dealing with environments with sparse rewards has always been crucial for systems developed to operate in autonomous open-ended learning settings. Intrinsic Motivations could be an effective way to help Deep Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Gianluca Maselli , Vieri Giuliano Santucci

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) has advanced LLM reasoning, applying it to long-context scenarios is hindered by sparsity of outcome rewards. This limitation fails to penalize ungrounded "lucky guesses," leaving the critical process of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Xin Guan , Zijian Li , Shen Huang , Pengjun Xie , Jingren Zhou , Jiuxin Cao

In many real-world scenarios, rewards extrinsic to the agent are extremely sparse, or absent altogether. In such cases, curiosity can serve as an intrinsic reward signal to enable the agent to explore its environment and learn skills that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-16 Deepak Pathak , Pulkit Agrawal , Alexei A. Efros , Trevor Darrell

To handle the sparsity of the extrinsic rewards in reinforcement learning, researchers have proposed intrinsic reward which enables the agent to learn the skills that might come in handy for pursuing the rewards in the future, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Chao Chen , Zijian Gao , Kele Xu , Sen Yang , Yiying Li , Bo Ding , Dawei Feng , Huaimin Wang