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We study the problem of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), where the learning agent recovers a reward function using expert demonstrations. Most of the existing IRL techniques make the often unrealistic assumption that the agent has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-20 Franck Djeumou , Murat Cubuktepe , Craig Lennon , Ufuk Topcu

Imitation Learning (IL) is an effective learning paradigm exploiting the interactions between agents and environments. It does not require explicit reward signals and instead tries to recover desired policies using expert demonstrations. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Yang Liu , Yongzhe Chang , Shilei Jiang , Xueqian Wang , Bin Liang , Bo Yuan

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that users specify tasks by manually writing down a reward function. However, this process can be laborious and demands considerable technical expertise. Can we devise RL algorithms that instead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Philippe Morere , Gilad Francis , Tom Blau , Fabio Ramos

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) often struggle with problems that require multi-step reasoning. For small-scale open-source models, Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) fails when correct solutions are rarely sampled even…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Yihe Deng , I-Hung Hsu , Jun Yan , Zifeng Wang , Rujun Han , Gufeng Zhang , Yanfei Chen , Wei Wang , Tomas Pfister , Chen-Yu Lee

Imitation learning (IL) is a framework that learns to imitate expert behavior from demonstrations. Recently, IL shows promising results on high dimensional and control tasks. However, IL typically suffers from sample inefficiency in terms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-24 Lihua Zhang

Our goal is for agents to optimize the right reward function, despite how difficult it is for us to specify what that is. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) enables us to infer reward functions from demonstrations, but it usually assumes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Rohin Shah , Noah Gundotra , Pieter Abbeel , Anca D. Dragan

We propose a novel Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) method that mitigates the rigidity of fixed reward structures and the limited flexibility of implicit reward regularization. Building on the Maximum Entropy IRL framework, our approach…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Adib Karimi , Mohammad Mehdi Ebadzadeh

We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework under a broad class of risk objectives, characterized by convex scoring functions. This class covers many common risk measures, such as variance, Expected Shortfall, entropic Value-at-Risk,…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-05-16 Shanyu Han , Yang Liu , Xiang Yu

The aim of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world applications is to create systems capable of making autonomous decisions by learning from their environment through trial and error. This paper emphasizes the importance of reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Sinan Ibrahim , Mostafa Mostafa , Ali Jnadi , Hadi Salloum , Pavel Osinenko

Several AutoML approaches have been proposed to automate the machine learning (ML) process, such as searching for the ML model architectures and hyper-parameters. However, these AutoML pipelines only focus on improving the learning accuracy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-18 Xiaoyang Wang , Bo Li , Yibo Zhang , Bhavya Kailkhura , Klara Nahrstedt

Designing suitable reward functions for numerous interacting intelligent agents is challenging in real-world applications. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) in mean field games (MFGs) offers a practical framework to infer reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Yang Chen , Xiao Lin , Bo Yan , Libo Zhang , Jiamou Liu , Neset Özkan Tan , Michael Witbrock

Reward specification plays a central role in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding the agent's behavior. To express non-Markovian rewards, formalisms such as reward machines have been introduced to capture dependencies on histories. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Rajarshi Roy , Anirban Majumdar , Ritam Raha , David Parker , Marta Kwiatkowska

Recent extensive research has demonstrated that the enhanced reasoning capabilities acquired by models through Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) are primarily concentrated within the rank-1 components. Predicated on this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Hao Ye , Jisheng Dang , Junfeng Fang , Bimei Wang , Yizhou Zhang , Ning Lv , Wencan Zhang , Hong Peng , Bin Hu , Tat-Seng Chua

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been a main driver of recent breakthroughs in large reasoning models. Yet it remains a mystery how rewards based solely on final outcomes can help overcome the long-horizon barrier…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Yu Huang , Zixin Wen , Yuejie Chi , Yuting Wei , Aarti Singh , Yingbin Liang , Yuxin Chen

In Imitation Learning (IL), utilizing suboptimal and heterogeneous demonstrations presents a substantial challenge due to the varied nature of real-world data. However, standard IL algorithms consider these datasets as homogeneous, thereby…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Mark Beliaev , Ramtin Pedarsani

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to estimate the reward function of optimizing agents by observing their response (estimates or actions). This paper considers IRL when noisy estimates of the gradient of a reward function generated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Vikram Krishnamurthy , George Yin

We consider the optimal sample complexity theory of tabular reinforcement learning (RL) for maximizing the infinite horizon discounted reward in a Markov decision process (MDP). Optimal worst-case complexity results have been developed for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Shengbo Wang , Jose Blanchet , Peter Glynn

Reward functions are difficult to design and often hard to align with human intent. Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms address these problems by learning reward functions from human feedback. However, the majority of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Joey Hejna , Dorsa Sadigh