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Reinforcement learning struggles in the face of long-horizon tasks and sparse goals due to the difficulty in manual reward specification. While existing methods address this by adding intrinsic rewards, they may fail to provide meaningful…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Zeyuan Liu , Ziyu Huan , Xiyao Wang , Jiafei Lyu , Jian Tao , Xiu Li , Furong Huang , Huazhe Xu

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

In recent years Landmark Complexes have been successfully employed for localization-free and metric-free autonomous exploration using a group of sensing-limited and communication-limited robots in a GPS-denied environment. To ensure rapid…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Xiatao Sun , Yuwei Wu , Subhrajit Bhattacharya , Vijay Kumar

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are highly sensitive to reward function specification, which remains a central challenge limiting their broad applicability. We present ARM-FM: Automated Reward Machines via Foundation Models, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Roger Creus Castanyer , Faisal Mohamed , Pablo Samuel Castro , Cyrus Neary , Glen Berseth

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exciting progress in acquiring diverse new capabilities through in-context learning, ranging from logical reasoning to code-writing. Robotics researchers have also explored using LLMs to…

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

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning abilities in mathematical tasks, often enhanced through reinforcement learning (RL). However, RL-trained models frequently produce unnecessarily long reasoning traces -- even…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Jinyan Su , Claire Cardie

Reward engineering has long been a challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) research, as it often requires extensive human effort and iterative processes of trial-and-error to design effective reward functions. In this paper, we propose…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Yufei Wang , Zhanyi Sun , Jesse Zhang , Zhou Xian , Erdem Biyik , David Held , Zackory Erickson

Driven by the rapid growth of machine learning, recent advances in game artificial intelligence (AI) have significantly impacted productivity across various gaming genres. Reward design plays a pivotal role in training game AI models,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-19 In-Chang Baek , Tae-Hwa Park , Jin-Ha Noh , Cheong-Mok Bae , Kyung-Joong Kim

Enabling a high-degree-of-freedom robot to learn specific skills is a challenging task due to the complexity of robotic dynamics. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising solution; however, addressing such problems requires…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Changxin Huang , Junyang Liang , Yanbin Chang , Jingzhao Xu , Jianqiang Li

Reward engineering, the manual specification of reward functions to induce desired agent behavior, remains a fundamental challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning. This difficulty is amplified by credit assignment ambiguity,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Haoran Su , Yandong Sun , Congjia Yu

Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are able to understand visual concepts, describe and decompose complex tasks into sub-tasks, and provide feedback on task completion. In this paper, we aim to leverage these capabilities to support…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 David Venuto , Sami Nur Islam , Martin Klissarov , Doina Precup , Sherry Yang , Ankit Anand

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central problem in artificial intelligence. This problem consists of defining artificial agents that can learn optimal behaviour by interacting with an environment -- where the optimal behaviour is defined…

Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-10 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

A promising approach for improving reasoning in large language models is to use process reward models (PRMs). PRMs provide feedback at each step of a multi-step reasoning trace, potentially improving credit assignment over outcome reward…

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

When designing reinforcement learning (RL) agents, a designer communicates the desired agent behavior through the definition of reward functions - numerical feedback given to the agent as reward or punishment for its actions. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Michel Ma , Takuma Seno , Kaushik Subramanian , Peter R. Wurman , Peter Stone , Craig Sherstan

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as promising tools for automated reinforcement learning (RL) reward design, owing to their robust capabilities in commonsense reasoning and code generation. By engaging in dialogues with RL agents,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-14 Zen Kit Heng , Zimeng Zhao , Tianhao Wu , Yuanfei Wang , Mingdong Wu , Yangang Wang , Hao Dong

Reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled the training of large language model (LLM) agents to interact with the environment and to solve multi-turn long-horizon tasks. However, the RL-trained agents often struggle in tasks that require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Yulun Jiang , Liangze Jiang , Damien Teney , Michael Moor , Maria Brbic