Related papers: Mind the Gap: Offline Policy Optimization for Impe…
Reinforcement learning (RL) methods usually treat reward functions as black boxes. As such, these methods must extensively interact with the environment in order to discover rewards and optimal policies. In most RL applications, however,…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective tool for real-world recommender systems with its capacity to model the dynamic interest of users and its interactive nature. Most existing offline RL recommender systems focus on…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to align large language models (LLMs). Off-policy methods offer greater implementation simplicity and data efficiency than on-policy techniques, but often result in suboptimal performance. In…
This paper studies tabular reinforcement learning (RL) in the hybrid setting, which assumes access to both an offline dataset and online interactions with the unknown environment. A central question boils down to how to efficiently utilize…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great promise with algorithms learning in environments with large state and action spaces purely from scalar reward signals. A crucial challenge for current deep RL algorithms is that they require a…
Process reward models (PRMs) allow for fine-grained credit assignment in reinforcement learning (RL), and seemingly contrast with outcome reward models (ORMs), which assign a single reward to an entire trajectory. However, we provide…
Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…
Applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems is often made challenging by the inability to interact with the environment and the difficulty of designing reward functions. Offline RL addresses the first challenge by…
Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…
In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great potential in refining robotic manipulation policies, yet its efficacy remains strongly bottlenecked by the difficulty of designing generalizable reward functions. In this paper, we propose a…
Single-task RL agents are typically trained under a fixed reward function, which limits their robustness to reward misspecification and their ability to adapt to changing preferences. We introduce Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) addresses the problem of recovering a task description given a demonstration of the optimal policy used to solve such a task. The optimal policy is usually provided by an expert or teacher, making IRL…
The ability of reinforcement learning algorithms to learn effective policies is determined by the rewards available during training. However, for practical problems, obtaining large quantities of reward labels is often infeasible due to…
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…
From a first-principles perspective, it may seem odd that the strongest results in foundation model fine-tuning (FT) are achieved via a relatively complex, two-stage training procedure. Specifically, one first trains a reward model (RM) on…
For task-oriented dialog systems, training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based Dialog Management module suffers from low sample efficiency and slow convergence speed due to the sparse rewards in RL.To solve this problem, many strategies…
No real-world reward function is perfect. Sensory errors and software bugs may result in RL agents observing higher (or lower) rewards than they should. For example, a reinforcement learning agent may prefer states where a sensory error…
Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…