English
Related papers

Related papers: STARC: A General Framework For Quantifying Differe…

200 papers

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-02-09 Héctor Ratia , Luis Montesano , Ruben Martinez-Cantin

Exploration in reinforcement learning is a challenging problem: in the worst case, the agent must search for high-reward states that could be hidden anywhere in the state space. Can we define a more tractable class of RL problems, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Kevin Li , Abhishek Gupta , Ashwin Reddy , Vitchyr Pong , Aurick Zhou , Justin Yu , Sergey Levine

Reward models play a critical role in guiding large language models toward outputs that align with human expectations. However, an open challenge remains in effectively utilizing test-time compute to enhance reward model performance. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Jiaxin Guo , Zewen Chi , Li Dong , Qingxiu Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Furu Wei

Robots can learn to imitate humans by inferring what the human is optimizing for. One common framework for this is Bayesian reward learning, where the robot treats the human's demonstrations and corrections as observations of their…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Joshua Hoegerman , Dylan P. Losey

We initiate the study of fairness in reinforcement learning, where the actions of a learning algorithm may affect its environment and future rewards. Our fairness constraint requires that an algorithm never prefers one action over another…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-08-08 Shahin Jabbari , Matthew Joseph , Michael Kearns , Jamie Morgenstern , Aaron Roth

Most learning algorithms are not invariant to the scale of the function that is being approximated. We propose to adaptively normalize the targets used in learning. This is useful in value-based reinforcement learning, where the magnitude…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-08-17 Hado van Hasselt , Arthur Guez , Matteo Hessel , Volodymyr Mnih , David Silver

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in text generation to alleviate the exposure bias issue or to utilize non-parallel datasets. The reward function plays an important role in making RL training successful. However, previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-19 Yongchang Hao , Yuxin Liu , Lili Mou

Learning reward models from human preference datasets and subsequently optimizing language models via reinforcement learning has emerged as a fundamental paradigm for aligning LLMs with human preferences. The performance of the reward model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Wenjie Qiu , Yi-Chen Li , Xuqin Zhang , Tianyi Zhang , Yihang Zhang , Zongzhang Zhang , Yang Yu

A Markov decision process can be parameterized by a transition kernel and a reward function. Both play essential roles in the study of reinforcement learning as evidenced by their presence in the Bellman equations. In our inquiry of various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-04 Falcon Z. Dai

Reward hacking is a form of misalignment in which models overoptimize proxy rewards without genuinely solving the underlying task. Precisely measuring reward hacking occurrence remains challenging because true task rewards are often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Muhammad Khalifa , Zohaib Khan , Omer Tafveez , Hao Peng , Lu Wang

Learned representations in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have to extract task-relevant information from complex observations, balancing between robustness to distraction and informativeness to the policy. Such stable and rich…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Mete Kemertas , Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong

Reward models are critical for improving large language models (LLMs), particularly in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) or inference-time verification. Current reward modeling typically relies on scores of overall responses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Chaoyang Zhou , Shunyu Liu , Zengmao Wang , Di Wang , Rong-Cheng Tu , Bo Du , Dacheng Tao

In this paper, we study the problem of deceptive reinforcement learning to preserve the privacy of a reward function. Reinforcement learning is the problem of finding a behaviour policy based on rewards received from exploratory behaviour.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Zhengshang Liu , Yue Yang , Tim Miller , Peta Masters

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for complex reasoning tasks with clear correctness signals such as math and coding. However, extending it to real-world reasoning tasks is challenging, as evaluation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Anisha Gunjal , Anthony Wang , Elaine Lau , Vaskar Nath , Yunzhong He , Bing Liu , Sean Hendryx

In reinforcement learning, we often define goals by specifying rewards within desirable states. One problem with this approach is that we typically need to redefine the rewards each time the goal changes, which often requires some…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-07-26 Ashley D. Edwards , Srijan Sood , Charles L. Isbell

The specification of aMarkov decision process (MDP) can be difficult. Reward function specification is especially problematic; in practice, it is often cognitively complex and time-consuming for users to precisely specify rewards. This work…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-05-14 Kevin Regan , Craig Boutilier

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to learn a reward function and a corresponding policy that best fit the demonstrated trajectories of an expert. However, current IRL works cannot learn incrementally from an ongoing trajectory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Shicheng Liu , Minghui Zhu

Inverse reinforcement learning is the problem of inferring a reward function from an optimal policy or demonstrations by an expert. In this work, it is assumed that the reward is expressed as a reward machine whose transitions depend on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Mohamad Louai Shehab , Antoine Aspeel , Necmiye Ozay

Preference learning is critical for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, with the quality of preference datasets playing a crucial role in this process. While existing metrics primarily assess data quality based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Kexin Huang , Junkang Wu , Ziqian Chen , Xue Wang , Jinyang Gao , Bolin Ding , Jiancan Wu , Xiangnan He , Xiang Wang

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-08-22 Tom Everitt , Victoria Krakovna , Laurent Orseau , Marcus Hutter , Shane Legg