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An emerging field of sequential decision problems is safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), where the objective is to maximize the reward while obeying safety constraints. Being able to handle constraints is essential for deploying RL agents in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Nick Bührer , Zhejun Zhang , Alexander Liniger , Fisher Yu , Luc Van Gool

Reliable real-world deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) methods requires a nuanced understanding of their strengths and weaknesses and how they compare to those of humans. Human-machine systems are becoming more prevalent and the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Eric Pulick , Vladimir Menkov , Yonatan Mintz , Paul Kantor , Vicki Bier

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has shown strong promise for LLM reasoning, but outcome-based RLVR remains inefficient on hard problems because correct final-answer rollouts are rare and sample-level credit assignment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Xitai Jiang , Zihan Tang , Wenze Lin , Yang Yue , Shenzhi Wang , Gao Huang

Reinforcement learning (RL) solves sequential decision-making problems via a trial-and-error process interacting with the environment. While RL achieves outstanding success in playing complex video games that allow huge trial-and-error,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Fan-Ming Luo , Tian Xu , Hang Lai , Xiong-Hui Chen , Weinan Zhang , Yang Yu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated a huge potential in learning optimal policies without any prior knowledge of the process to be controlled. Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a popular control technique which is able to deal with…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2019-04-10 Mario Zanon , Sébastien Gros , Alberto Bemporad

Machine learning-based intrusion detection requires complex models to capture patterns in high-dimensional, noisy, and class-imbalanced raw network traffic, yet deploying such models remains impractical on resource-constrained devices with…

Motivated by high-stakes decision-making domains like personalized medicine where user information is inherently sensitive, we design privacy preserving exploration policies for episodic reinforcement learning (RL). We first provide a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-22 Giuseppe Vietri , Borja Balle , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Zhiwei Steven Wu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become essential to the post-training of large language models (LLMs) for reasoning, agentic capabilities and alignment. Successful RL relies on sufficient exploration of diverse actions by the model during…

Several recent works have proposed a class of algorithms for the offline reinforcement learning (RL) problem that we will refer to as return-conditioned supervised learning (RCSL). RCSL algorithms learn the distribution of actions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-12 David Brandfonbrener , Alberto Bietti , Jacob Buckman , Romain Laroche , Joan Bruna

This paper offers a new perspective on the limits of machine learning: the ceiling on progress is set not by model size or algorithm choice but by the information structure of the task itself. Code generation has progressed more reliably…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Zhimin Zhao

Current reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can be brittle and difficult to use, especially when learning goal-reaching behaviors from sparse rewards. Although supervised imitation learning provides a simple and stable alternative, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Dibya Ghosh , Abhishek Gupta , Ashwin Reddy , Justin Fu , Coline Devin , Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine

The broader application of reinforcement learning (RL) is limited by challenges including data efficiency, generalization capability, and ability to learn in sparse-reward environments. Meta-learning has emerged as a promising approach to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Octavio Pappalardo , Rodrigo Ramele , Juan Miguel Santos

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Evan Zheran Liu , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Tianlin Shi , Percy Liang

Safety remains a central obstacle preventing widespread use of RL in the real world: learning new tasks in uncertain environments requires extensive exploration, but safety requires limiting exploration. We propose Recovery RL, an algorithm…

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

While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has fueled multiple high-profile successes in machine learning, it is held back from more widespread adoption by its often poor data efficiency and the limited generality of the policies it produces. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Jacob Beck , Risto Vuorio , Evan Zheran Liu , Zheng Xiong , Luisa Zintgraf , Chelsea Finn , Shimon Whiteson

Active Reinforcement Learning (ARL) is a twist on RL where the agent observes reward information only if it pays a cost. This subtle change makes exploration substantially more challenging. Powerful principles in RL like optimism, Thompson…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-28 Sebastian Schulze , Owain Evans

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated superior performance in enhancing the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs). However, this accuracy-oriented learning paradigm often suffers from entropy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Hongye Cao , Zhixin Bai , Ziyue Peng , Boyan Wang , Tianpei Yang , Jing Huo , Yuyao Zhang , Yang Gao

We study reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation, where the agent works in two phases: (1) in the exploration phase, the agent interacts with the environment but cannot access the reward; and (2) in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Junkai Zhang , Weitong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

The explore{exploit dilemma is one of the central challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Bayesian RL solves the dilemma by providing the agent with information in the form of a prior distribution over environments; however, full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-19 Jonathan Sorg , Satinder Singh , Richard L. Lewis