English
Related papers

Related papers: Model-free Reinforcement Learning with Stochastic …

200 papers

Language models must be adapted to understand and follow user instructions. Reinforcement learning is widely used to facilitate this -- typically using fixed criteria such as "helpfulness" and "harmfulness". In our work, we instead propose…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Vijay Viswanathan , Yanchao Sun , Shuang Ma , Xiang Kong , Meng Cao , Graham Neubig , Tongshuang Wu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a technique to learn the control policy for an agent that interacts with a stochastic environment. In any given state, the agent takes some action, and the environment determines the probability distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Gaurav Gupta , Chenzhong Yin , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh , Paul Bogdan

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a variant of reinforcement learning (RL) that learns from human feedback instead of relying on an engineered reward function. Building on prior work on the related setting of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Timo Kaufmann , Paul Weng , Viktor Bengs , Eyke Hüllermeier

Reinforcement learning (RL) so far has limited real-world applications. One key challenge is that typical RL algorithms heavily rely on a reset mechanism to sample proper initial states; these reset mechanisms, in practice, are expensive to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Hoai-An Nguyen , Ching-An Cheng

Ensuring safety via safety filters in real-world robotics presents significant challenges, particularly when the system dynamics is complex or unavailable. To handle this issue, learning-based safety filters recently gained popularity,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Guo Ning Sue , Yogita Choudhary , Richard Desatnik , Carmel Majidi , John Dolan , Guanya Shi

Reward models have become a staple in modern NLP, serving as not only a scalable text evaluator, but also an indispensable component in many alignment recipes and inference-time algorithms. However, while recent reward models increase…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Zhaofeng Wu , Michihiro Yasunaga , Andrew Cohen , Yoon Kim , Asli Celikyilmaz , Marjan Ghazvininejad

Techniques based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) are increasingly being used to design control policies for robotic systems. RL fundamentally relies on state-based reward functions to encode desired behavior of the robot and bad reward…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-11 Parv Kapoor , Anand Balakrishnan , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

This paper explores multiple optimization methods to improve the performance of rating-based reinforcement learning (RbRL). RbRL, a method based on the idea of human ratings, has been developed to infer reward functions in reward-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Evelyn Rose , Devin White , Mingkang Wu , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

We consider the problem of sequential recommendation, where the current recommendation is made based on past interactions. This recommendation task requires efficient processing of the sequential data and aims to provide recommendations…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-07-28 Xumei Xi , Yuke Zhao , Quan Liu , Liwen Ouyang , Yang Wu

Reinforcement learning has become a cornerstone for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models, where group-based approaches such as GRPO have emerged as efficient paradigms that optimize policies by leveraging…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been credited as the key advance that has allowed Large Language Models (LLMs) to effectively follow instructions and produce useful assistance. Classically, this involves generating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-02 Alex J. Chan , Hao Sun , Samuel Holt , Mihaela van der Schaar

In this paper, we propose a theoretically founded sequential strategy for training large-scale Recommender Systems (RS) over implicit feedback, mainly in the form of clicks. The proposed approach consists in minimizing pairwise ranking loss…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Aleksandra Burashnikova , Marianne Clausel , Charlotte Laclau , Frack Iutzeller , Yury Maximov , Massih-Reza Amini

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

Interactive Recommender Systems (IRSs) have attracted a lot of attention, due to their ability to model interactive processes between users and recommender systems. Numerous approaches have adopted Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, as…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-08-23 Hojoon Lee , Dongyoon Hwang , Kyushik Min , Jaegul Choo

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a general framework concerned with an agent that seeks to maximize rewards in an environment. The learning typically happens through trial and error using explorative methods, such as epsilon-greedy. There are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Per-Arne Andersen , Morten Goodwin , Ole-Christoffer Granmo

Building systems that are good for society in the face of complex societal effects requires a dynamic approach. Recent approaches to machine learning (ML) documentation have demonstrated the promise of discursive frameworks for deliberation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Thomas Krendl Gilbert , Nathan Lambert , Sarah Dean , Tom Zick , Aaron Snoswell

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in performing complex tasks. While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been effective in aligning LLMs with human preferences, it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Chaoqi Wang , Zhuokai Zhao , Yibo Jiang , Zhaorun Chen , Chen Zhu , Yuxin Chen , Jiayi Liu , Lizhu Zhang , Xiangjun Fan , Hao Ma , Sinong Wang

Recommendation models are predominantly trained using implicit user feedback, since explicit feedback is often costly to obtain. However, implicit feedback, such as clicks, does not always reflect users' real preferences. For example, a…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Mengchen Zhao , Yifan Gao , Yaqing Hou , Xiangyang Li , Pengjie Gu , Zhenhua Dong , Ruiming Tang , Yi Cai

This paper proposes a novel formulation for reinforcement learning (RL) with large language models, explaining why and under what conditions the true sequence-level reward can be optimized via a surrogate token-level objective in policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Chujie Zheng , Kai Dang , Bowen Yu , Mingze Li , Huiqiang Jiang , Junrong Lin , Yuqiong Liu , Hao Lin , Chencan Wu , Feng Hu , An Yang , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Daniel Shin , Anca D. Dragan , Daniel S. Brown