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AI agents are commonly aligned with "human values" through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), where a single reward model is learned from aggregated human feedback and used to align an agent's behavior. However, human values…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Carter Blair , Kate Larson , Edith Law

Designing effective auxiliary rewards for cooperative multi-agent systems remains challenging, as misaligned incentives can induce suboptimal coordination, particularly when sparse task rewards provide insufficient grounding for coordinated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Dogan Urgun , Gokhan Gungor

The correct specification of reward models is a well-known challenge in reinforcement learning. Hand-crafted reward functions often lead to inefficient or suboptimal policies and may not be aligned with user values. Reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Muhan Lin , Shuyang Shi , Yue Guo , Behdad Chalaki , Vaishnav Tadiparthi , Ehsan Moradi Pari , Simon Stepputtis , Joseph Campbell , Katia Sycara

A centerpiece of the ever-popular reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) approach to fine-tuning autoregressive language models is the explicit training of a reward model to emulate human feedback, distinct from the language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-22 Wanqiao Xu , Shi Dong , Dilip Arumugam , Benjamin Van Roy

Current reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) pipelines for large language model (LLM) alignment typically assign scalar rewards to sequences, using the final token as a surrogate indicator for the quality of the entire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Ryan Koo , Ian Yang , Vipul Raheja , Mingyi Hong , Kwang-Sung Jun , Dongyeop Kang

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate transformative potential, yet their reasoning remains inconsistent and unreliable. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning is a key mechanism for improvement, but its effectiveness is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Pei-Chi Pan , Yingbin Liang , Sen Lin

An appropriate reward function is of paramount importance in specifying a task in reinforcement learning (RL). Yet, it is known to be extremely challenging in practice to design a correct reward function for even simple tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-19 Dingwen Kong , Lin F. Yang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a pivotal technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, yet it is susceptible to reward overoptimization, in which policy models overfit to the reward model,…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a powerful paradigm for aligning foundation models to human values and preferences. However, current RLHF techniques cannot account for the naturally occurring differences in individual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Sriyash Poddar , Yanming Wan , Hamish Ivison , Abhishek Gupta , Natasha Jaques

Static feature exclusion strategies often fail to prevent bias when hidden dependencies influence the model predictions. To address this issue, we explore a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that integrates bias mitigation and automated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sudip Khadka , L. S. Paudel

Reward shaping is an effective technique for incorporating domain knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as potential-based reward shaping normally make full use of a given shaping reward function. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-06 Yujing Hu , Weixun Wang , Hangtian Jia , Yixiang Wang , Yingfeng Chen , Jianye Hao , Feng Wu , Changjie Fan

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences is critical to recent advances in generative artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is widely applied to achieve this objective. A key step in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-03 Pangpang Liu , Chengchun Shi , Will Wei Sun

When training artificial intelligence (AI) to perform tasks, humans often care not only about whether a task is completed but also how it is performed. As AI agents tackle increasingly complex tasks, aligning their behavior with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Zhiqin Qian , Ryan Diaz , Sangwon Seo , Vaibhav Unhelkar

Reward functions are central in specifying the task we want a reinforcement learning agent to perform. Given a task and desired optimal behavior, we study the problem of designing informative reward functions so that the designed rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Rati Devidze , Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Adish Singla

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) policies, although optimal in terms of task rewards, may not align with the personal preferences of human users. To ensure this alignment, a naive solution would be to retrain the agent using a reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Ajsal Shereef Palattuparambil , Thommen George Karimpanal , Santu Rana

Designing optimal reward functions has been desired but extremely difficult in reinforcement learning (RL). When it comes to modern complex tasks, sophisticated reward functions are widely used to simplify policy learning yet even a tiny…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Ning Wei , Jiahua Liang , Di Xie , Shiliang Pu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Zhengxu Hou , Bang Liu , Ruihui Zhao , Zijing Ou , Yafei Liu , Xi Chen , Yefeng Zheng

Reward design is a fundamental, yet challenging aspect of reinforcement learning (RL). Researchers typically utilize feedback signals from the environment to handcraft a reward function, but this process is not always effective due to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Alexander Bukharin , Yixiao Li , Pengcheng He , Tuo Zhao

We provide a framework for accelerating reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms by heuristics constructed from domain knowledge or offline data. Tabula rasa RL algorithms require environment interactions or computation that scales with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Ching-An Cheng , Andrey Kolobov , Adith Swaminathan

There is a surge of interest in using formal languages such as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) to precisely and succinctly specify complex tasks and derive reward functions for Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, existing methods often assign…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Minjae Kwon , Ingy ElSayed-Aly , Lu Feng