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Related papers: Reward Gaming in Conditional Text Generation

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Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework for solving sequential decision-making problems. In this work, we demonstrate that, surprisingly, RL emerges during the inference time of large language models (LLMs), a phenomenon we term…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Kefan Song , Amir Moeini , Peng Wang , Lei Gong , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang , Yanjun Qi

Reinforcement learning (RL) faces challenges in evaluating policy trajectories within intricate game tasks due to the difficulty in designing comprehensive and precise reward functions. This inherent difficulty curtails the broader…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Zichao Shen , Tianchen Zhu , Qingyun Sun , Shiqi Gao , Jianxin Li

Social goods, such as healthcare, smart city, and information networks, often produce ordered event data in continuous time. The generative processes of these event data can be very complex, requiring flexible models to capture their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-29 Shuang Li , Shuai Xiao , Shixiang Zhu , Nan Du , Yao Xie , Le Song

The complexity of designing reward functions has been a major obstacle to the wide application of deep reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. Describing an agent's desired behaviors and properties can be difficult, even for experts. A new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Wanqi Xue , Bo An , Shuicheng Yan , Zhongwen Xu

Generating high-quality stories spanning thousands of tokens requires competency across a variety of skills, from tracking plot and character arcs to keeping a consistent and engaging style. Due to the difficulty of sourcing labeled…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Alexander Gurung , Mirella Lapata

Solving a reinforcement learning problem typically involves correctly prespecifying the reward signal from which the algorithm learns. Here, we approach the problem of reward signal design by using an evolutionary approach to perform a…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-05-19 Rafal Muszynski , Katja Hofmann , Jun Wang

Cooperation, fairness, trust, and resource coordination are cornerstones of modern civilization, yet their emergence remains inadequately explained by the persistent discrepancies between theoretical predictions and behavioral experiments.…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2026-05-21 Guozhong Zheng , Xin Ou , Shengfeng Deng , Jiqiang Zhang , Li Chen

World models predict state transitions in response to actions and are increasingly developed across diverse modalities. However, standard training objectives such as maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) often misalign with task-specific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Jialong Wu , Shaofeng Yin , Ningya Feng , Mingsheng Long

There are great interests as well as many challenges in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to recommendation systems. In this setting, an online user is the environment; neither the reward function nor the environment dynamics are clearly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-03 Xinshi Chen , Shuang Li , Hui Li , Shaohua Jiang , Yuan Qi , Le Song

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a crucial technology for aligning language models with human values and intentions, enabling models to produce more helpful and harmless responses. Reward models are trained as…

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have shown strong performance in complex domains such as Atari games, but are often highly sample inefficient. A common approach to reduce interaction time with the environment is to use reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Prasoon Goyal , Scott Niekum , Raymond J. Mooney

While most AI alignment research focuses on preventing models from generating explicitly harmful content, a more subtle risk is emerging: capability-oriented training induced exploitation. We investigate whether language models, when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Yujun Zhou , Yue Huang , Han Bao , Kehan Guo , Zhenwen Liang , Pin-Yu Chen , Tian Gao , Werner Geyer , Nuno Moniz , Nitesh V Chawla , Xiangliang Zhang

Reinforcement learning is increasingly used for code-centric tasks. These tasks include code generation, summarization, understanding, repair, testing, and optimization. This trend is growing faster with large language models and autonomous…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Md Rayhanul Masud , Azmine Toushik Wasi , Salman Rahman , Md Rizwan Parvez

Most of the existing generative adversarial networks (GAN) for text generation suffer from the instability of reinforcement learning training algorithms such as policy gradient, leading to unstable performance. To tackle this problem, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-08-21 Pei Ke , Fei Huang , Minlie Huang , Xiaoyan Zhu

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 potential of reinforcement learning (RL) to deliver aligned and performant agents is partially bottlenecked by the reward engineering problem. One alternative to heuristic trial-and-error is preference-based RL (PbRL), where a reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Tom Bewley , Freddy Lecue

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

Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task. This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Dhawal Gupta , Yash Chandak , Scott M. Jordan , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

Specification gaming is a critical failure mode of LLM agents. Despite this, there has been little systematic research into when it arises and what drives it. To address this, we build and open source a diverse suite of tasks where models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Kei Nishimura-Gasparian , Robert McCarthy , David Lindner

World models simulate dynamic environments, enabling agents to interact with diverse input modalities. Although recent advances have improved the visual quality and temporal consistency of video world models, their ability of accurately…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yang Ye , Tianyu He , Shuo Yang , Jiang Bian