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Related papers: Utilizing Prior Solutions for Reward Shaping and C…

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The composition of elementary behaviors to solve challenging transfer learning problems is one of the key elements in building intelligent machines. To date, there has been plenty of work on learning task-specific policies or skills but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Ahmed H. Qureshi , Jacob J. Johnson , Yuzhe Qin , Taylor Henderson , Byron Boots , Michael C. Yip

It is a long-standing question to discover causal relations among a set of variables in many empirical sciences. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved promising results in causal discovery from observational data. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Xiaoqiang Wang , Yali Du , Shengyu Zhu , Liangjun Ke , Zhitang Chen , Jianye Hao , Jun Wang

Safety is critical when applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. As a result, safe RL has emerged as a fundamental and powerful paradigm for optimizing an agent's policy while incorporating notions of safety. A prevalent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Akifumi Wachi , Xun Shen , Yanan Sui

Much of the current work on reinforcement learning studies episodic settings, where the agent is reset between trials to an initial state distribution, often with well-shaped reward functions. Non-episodic settings, where the agent must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 John D. Co-Reyes , Suvansh Sanjeev , Glen Berseth , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine

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

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) has proven to be a successful framework for leveraging experience from prior tasks to rapidly learn new related tasks, however, current meta-RL approaches struggle to learn in sparse reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-12-03 Charles Packer , Pieter Abbeel , Joseph E. Gonzalez

We propose a framework for verifiable and compositional reinforcement learning (RL) in which a collection of RL subsystems, each of which learns to accomplish a separate subtask, are composed to achieve an overall task. The framework…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-09-13 Cyrus Neary , Aryaman Singh Samyal , Christos Verginis , Murat Cubuktepe , Ufuk Topcu

The emergence of compositional reasoning in large language models through reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been a key driver of recent empirical successes. Despite this progress, it remains unclear which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Daniel Barzilai , Yotam Wolf , Ronen Basri

Associative thinking--the ability to connect seemingly unrelated ideas--is a foundational element of human creativity and problem-solving. This paper explores whether reinforcement learning (RL) guided by associative thinking principles can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mukul Singh , Ananya Singha , Aishni Parab , Pronita Mehrotra , Sumit Gulwani

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), it is commonly assumed that an immediate reward signal is generated for each action taken by the agent, helping the agent maximize cumulative rewards to obtain the optimal policy. However, in many real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Yuting Tang , Xin-Qiang Cai , Yao-Xiang Ding , Qiyu Wu , Guoqing Liu , Masashi Sugiyama

Efficient and effective learning is one of the ultimate goals of the deep reinforcement learning (DRL), although the compromise has been made in most of the time, especially for the application of robot manipulations. Learning is always…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Yongle Luo , Kun Dong , Lili Zhao , Zhiyong Sun , Chao Zhou , Bo Song

Current reinforcement learning (RL) methods can successfully learn single tasks but often generalize poorly to modest perturbations in task domain or training procedure. In this work, we present a decoupled learning strategy for RL that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-10 Amy Zhang , Harsh Satija , Joelle Pineau

The automatic synthesis of a policy through reinforcement learning (RL) from a given set of formal requirements depends on the construction of a reward signal and consists of the iterative application of many policy-improvement steps. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Luigi Berducci , Radu Grosu

Reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in sparse reward settings, often requires prohibitively large numbers of interactions with the environment, thereby limiting its applicability to complex problems. To address this, several prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Prasoon Goyal , Scott Niekum , Raymond J. Mooney

Existing alignment methods directly use the reward model learned from user preference data to optimize an LLM policy, subject to KL regularization with respect to the base policy. This practice is suboptimal for maximizing user's utility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Haichuan Wang , Tao Lin , Lingkai Kong , Ce Li , Hezi Jiang , Milind Tambe

In many real-world scenarios, reward signal for agents are exceedingly sparse, making it challenging to learn an effective reward function for reward shaping. To address this issue, the proposed approach in this paper performs reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Wenyun Li , Wenjie Huang , Chen Sun

Compositional generalization refers to correctly interpret novel combinations of known primitives, which remains a major challenge. Existing approaches often rely on supervised fine-tuning, which encourages models to imitate target outputs.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xiyan Fu , Wei Liu

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

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in solving complex problems through reinforcement learning (RL), particularly by generating long reasoning traces. However, these extended outputs often exhibit substantial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Wei Liu , Ruochen Zhou , Yiyun Deng , Yuzhen Huang , Junteng Liu , Yuntian Deng , Yizhe Zhang , Junxian He

As more machine learning agents interact with humans, it is increasingly a prospect that an agent trained to perform a task optimally, using only a measure of task performance as feedback, can violate societal norms for acceptable behavior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Md Sultan Al Nahian , Spencer Frazier , Brent Harrison , Mark Riedl