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Related papers: Submodular Reinforcement Learning

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Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are designed to optimize problem-solving by learning actions that maximize rewards, a task that becomes particularly challenging in random and nonstationary environments. Even advanced RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Sebastian Zieglmeier , Niklas Erdmann , Narada D. Warakagoda

A deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agent observes its states through observations, which may contain natural measurement errors or adversarial noises. Since the observations deviate from the true states, they can mislead the agent into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-15 Huan Zhang , Hongge Chen , Chaowei Xiao , Bo Li , Mingyan Liu , Duane Boning , Cho-Jui Hsieh

Hierarchical reinforcement learning is a promising approach to tackle long-horizon decision-making problems with sparse rewards. Unfortunately, most methods still decouple the lower-level skill acquisition process and the training of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-15 Alexander C. Li , Carlos Florensa , Ignasi Clavera , Pieter Abbeel

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), due to the deterministic verification, becomes a dominant paradigm for enhancing the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). The community witnesses the rapid change from the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Mingwei Xu , Hao Fang

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has become the predominant algorithm for on-policy reinforcement learning due to its scalability and empirical robustness across domains. However, there is a significant disconnect between the underlying…

We develop several provably efficient model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We consider both online setting and the setting with access to a simulator. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Zihan Zhang , Qiaomin Xie

Extending large language models (LLMs) to low-resource languages often incurs an "alignment tax": improvements in the target language come at the cost of catastrophic forgetting in general capabilities. We argue that this trade-off arises…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Zeli Su , Ziyin Zhang , Zhou Liu , Xuexian Song , Zhankai Xu , Longfei Zheng , Xiaolu Zhang , Rong Fu , Guixian Xu , Wentao Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising tool to solve robust optimal well control problems where the model parameters are highly uncertain, and the system is partially observable in practice. However, RL of robust control policies often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Atish Dixit , Ahmed H. ElSheikh

We study reinforcement learning (RL) in the setting of continuous time and space, for an infinite horizon with a discounted objective and the underlying dynamics driven by a stochastic differential equation. Built upon recent advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Hanyang Zhao , Wenpin Tang , David D. Yao

Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Cevahir Koprulu , Ufuk Topcu

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) excels in various control tasks, yet the absence of safety guarantees hampers its real-world applicability. In particular, explorations during learning usually results in safety violations, while the RL…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Yifan Sun , Feihan Li , Weiye Zhao , Rui Chen , Tianhao Wei , Changliu Liu

We study a common challenge in reinforcement learning for large language models (LLMs): the Zero-Reward Assumption, where non-terminal actions (i.e., intermediate token generations) receive zero task-specific immediate reward, while only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Shenghua He , Tian Xia , Xuan Zhou , Hui Wei

Unsupervised speech emotion recognition (SER) focuses on addressing the problem of data sparsity and annotation bias of emotional speech. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising method which enhances the performance through rule-based or…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-09 Yingying Gao , Shilei Zhang , Runyan Yang , Zihao Cui , Junlan Feng

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) shows promise in training tool-use Large Language Models (LLMs) using verifiable outcome rewards, existing methods largely overlook the potential of reasoning rewards based on chain-of-thought quality for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Zihan Lin , Xiaohan Wang , Hexiong Yang , Jiajun Chai , Jie Cao , Guojun Yin , Wei Lin , Ran He

Finding optimal policies which maximize long term rewards of Markov Decision Processes requires the use of dynamic programming and backward induction to solve the Bellman optimality equation. However, many real-world problems require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal

A major challenge in real-world reinforcement learning (RL) is the sparsity of reward feedback. Often, what is available is an intuitive but sparse reward function that only indicates whether the task is completed partially or fully.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Desik Rengarajan , Gargi Vaidya , Akshay Sarvesh , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai

Learning control policies for complex, long-horizon tasks is a central challenge in robotics and autonomous systems. Signal Temporal Logic (STL) offers a powerful and expressive language for specifying such tasks, but its non-Markovian…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Yue Meng , Fei Chen , Chuchu Fan

Bugs in popular distributed protocol implementations have been the source of many downtimes in popular internet services. We describe a randomized testing approach for distributed protocol implementations based on reinforcement learning.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Andrea Borgarelli , Constantin Enea , Rupak Majumdar , Srinidhi Nagendra