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This research focuses on enhancing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms by integrating penalty functions to guide agents in avoiding unwanted actions while optimizing rewards. The goal is to improve the learning process by ensuring that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Sai Gana Sandeep Pula , Sathish A. P. Kumar , Sumit Jha , Arvind Ramanathan

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) have attracted growing attention for their ability to deliver personalized recommendations through natural language interactions. To more accurately infer user preferences from multi-turn…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Wei Yuan , Shutong Qiao , Tong Chen , Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen , Zi Huang , Hongzhi Yin

Multi-objective Markov decision processes are sequential decision-making problems that involve multiple conflicting reward functions that cannot be optimized simultaneously without a compromise. This type of problems cannot be solved by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Sherif Abdelfattah , Kathryn Merrick , Jiankun Hu

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) have become increasingly popular as a powerful tool for providing personalized recommendation experiences. By directly engaging with users in a conversational manner to learn their current and…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Allen Lin , Jianling Wang , Ziwei Zhu , James Caverlee

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) learns a reward function and a corresponding policy that best fit the demonstration data of an expert. However, in the current IRL setting, the learner is isolated from the expert and can only passively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yue Mao , Shicheng Liu , Siyuan Xu , Minghui Zhu

The success of many RL techniques heavily relies on human-engineered dense rewards, which typically demand substantial domain expertise and extensive trial and error. In our work, we propose DrS (Dense reward learning from Stages), a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-26 Tongzhou Mu , Minghua Liu , Hao Su

Rewards play a crucial role in reinforcement learning. To arrive at the desired policy, the design of a suitable reward function often requires significant domain expertise as well as trial-and-error. Here, we aim to minimize the effort…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-18 Zheng Wu , Wenzhao Lian , Vaibhav Unhelkar , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Stefan Schaal

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for tackling control problems, but its practical application is often hindered by the complexity arising from intricate reward functions with multiple terms. The reward hypothesis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Kilian Freitag , Kristian Ceder , Rita Laezza , Knut Åkesson , Morteza Haghir Chehreghani

In the last decade, Deep Reinforcement Learning has evolved into a powerful tool for complex sequential decision-making problems. It combines deep learning's proficiency in processing rich input signals with reinforcement learning's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Julien Roy

Reinforcement learning for embodied agents is a challenging problem. The accumulated reward to be optimized is often a very rugged function, and gradient methods are impaired by many local optimizers. We demonstrate, in an experimental…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-06-01 Guido Montufar , Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi , Nihat Ay

Reward machines are an established tool for dealing with reinforcement learning problems in which rewards are sparse and depend on complex sequences of actions. However, existing algorithms for learning reward machines assume an overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jan Corazza , Ivan Gavran , Daniel Neider

Research and development on conversational recommender systems (CRSs) critically depends on sound and reliable evaluation methodologies. However, the interactive nature of these systems poses significant challenges for automatic evaluation.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Nolwenn Bernard , Krisztian Balog

We study a class of reinforcement learning problems where the reward signals for policy learning are generated by an internal reward model that is dependent on and jointly optimized with the policy. This interdependence between the policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Mengdi Li , Xufeng Zhao , Jae Hee Lee , Cornelius Weber , Stefan Wermter

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents continually interact with the environment and use the feedback to refine their behavior. To guide policy optimization, reward models are introduced as proxies of the desired objectives, such that when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Rui Yu , Shenghua Wan , Yucen Wang , Chen-Xiao Gao , Le Gan , Zongzhang Zhang , De-Chuan Zhan

Reward function is essential in reinforcement learning (RL), serving as the guiding signal to incentivize agents to solve given tasks, however, is also notoriously difficult to design. In many cases, only imperfect rewards are available,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Jianxiong Li , Xiao Hu , Haoran Xu , Jingjing Liu , Xianyuan Zhan , Qing-Shan Jia , Ya-Qin Zhang

Reinforcement learning is widely used for dialogue policy optimization where the reward function often consists of more than one component, e.g., the dialogue success and the dialogue length. In this work, we propose a structured method for…

Learning to rank (LTR) plays a crucial role in various Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. Although supervised LTR methods based on fine-grained relevance labels (e.g., document-level annotations) have achieved significant success, their…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Yiteng Tu , Zhichao Xu , Tao Yang , Weihang Su , Yujia Zhou , Yiqun Liu , Fen Lin , Qin Liu , Qingyao Ai

Learning about many things can provide numerous benefits to a reinforcement learning system. For example, learning many auxiliary value functions, in addition to optimizing the environmental reward, appears to improve both exploration and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Cam Linke , Nadia M. Ady , Martha White , Thomas Degris , Adam White

Existing conversational search studies mainly focused on asking better clarifying questions and/or improving search result quality. These works aim at retrieving better responses according to the search context, and their performances are…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-04-18 Zhenduo Wang , Zhichao Xu , Qingyao Ai

This article surveys reinforcement learning approaches in social robotics. Reinforcement learning is a framework for decision-making problems in which an agent interacts through trial-and-error with its environment to discover an optimal…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Neziha Akalin , Amy Loutfi