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Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to learn a reward function and a corresponding policy that best fit the demonstrated trajectories of an expert. However, current IRL works cannot learn incrementally from an ongoing trajectory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Shicheng Liu , Minghui Zhu

While reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) significantly enhances LLM reasoning by optimizing the conditional distribution P(y|x), its potential is fundamentally bounded by the base model's existing output distribution.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Yuqiao Tan , Minzheng Wang , Bo Liu , Zichen Liu , Tian Liang , Shizhu He , Jun Zhao , Kang Liu

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a prevalent approach to align AI systems with human values by learning rewards from human preference data. Due to various reasons, however, such data typically takes the form of rankings…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Ilgee Hong , Zichong Li , Alexander Bukharin , Yixiao Li , Haoming Jiang , Tianbao Yang , Tuo Zhao

Value estimation is a critical component of the reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm. The question of how to effectively learn value predictors from data is one of the major problems studied by the RL community, and different approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-22 Arthur Guez , Fabio Viola , Théophane Weber , Lars Buesing , Steven Kapturowski , Doina Precup , David Silver , Nicolas Heess

In classic Reinforcement Learning (RL), the agent maximizes an additive objective of the visited states, e.g., a value function. Unfortunately, objectives of this type cannot model many real-world applications such as experiment design,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Riccardo De Santi , Manish Prajapat , Andreas Krause

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), it is commonly assumed that an immediate reward signal is generated for each action taken by the agent, helping the agent maximize cumulative rewards to obtain the optimal policy. However, in many real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Yuting Tang , Xin-Qiang Cai , Yao-Xiang Ding , Qiyu Wu , Guoqing Liu , Masashi Sugiyama

Preference-Based reinforcement learning (PBRL) learns directly from the preferences of human teachers regarding agent behaviors without needing meticulously designed reward functions. However, existing PBRL methods often learn primarily…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Ziang Liu , Junjie Xu , Xingjiao Wu , Jing Yang , Liang He

This paper develops a novel rating-based reinforcement learning approach that uses human ratings to obtain human guidance in reinforcement learning. Different from the existing preference-based and ranking-based reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Devin White , Mingkang Wu , Ellen Novoseller , Vernon J. Lawhern , Nicholas Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

Process reward models (PRMs) provide fine-grained supervision for reasoning, but reliable PRMs often require step annotations or heavy verification pipelines, making them costly to scale and refresh during online RL. Implicit PRMs reduce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Shiping Gao , Hongzhan Chen , Xiaojun Quan , Qifan Wang , Lifu Huang

In preference-based reinforcement learning (RL), an agent interacts with the environment while receiving preferences instead of absolute feedback. While there is increasing research activity in preference-based RL, the design of formal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Ellen R. Novoseller , Yibing Wei , Yanan Sui , Yisong Yue , Joel W. Burdick

We study reinforcement learning from human feedback in general Markov decision processes, where agents learn from trajectory-level preference comparisons. A central challenge in this setting is to design algorithms that select informative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Reda Ouhamma , Maryam Kamgarpour

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) has gained much attention for its ability to learn complex behaviors in a sample-efficient way: planning actions by generating imaginary trajectories with predicted rewards. Despite its success, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Vint Lee , Pieter Abbeel , Youngwoon Lee

Reinforcement learning has seen wide success in finetuning large language models to better align with instructions via human feedback. The so-called algorithm, Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) demonstrates impressive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-13 Tianjun Zhang , Fangchen Liu , Justin Wong , Pieter Abbeel , Joseph E. Gonzalez

With the implementation of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, current state-of-art autonomous vehicle technology have the potential to get closer to full automation. However, most of the applications have been limited to game domains…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-01-14 Wenhui Huang , Francesco Braghin , Zhuo Wang

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Daniel Shin , Daniel S. Brown , Anca D. Dragan

A shortcoming of batch reinforcement learning is its requirement for rewards in data, thus not applicable to tasks without reward functions. Existing settings for lack of reward, such as behavioral cloning, rely on optimal demonstrations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-30 Guoxi Zhang , Hisashi Kashima

Many reinforcement-learning researchers treat the reward function as a part of the environment, meaning that the agent can only know the reward of a state if it encounters that state in a trial run. However, we argue that this is an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-18 Eli Friedman , Fred Fontaine

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in sequential decision-making by leveraging the highly expressive model capabilities in policy learning. A central problem for learning diffusion policies is to align the policy output with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Zhao Shan , Chenyou Fan , Shuang Qiu , Jiyuan Shi , Chenjia Bai

Hindsight experience replay (HER) is well-known to accelerate goal-based reinforcement learning (RL). While HER is generally applied to off-policy RL algorithms, we previously showed that HER can also accelerate on-policy algorithms, such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Douglas C. Crowder , Matthew L. Trappett , Darrien M. McKenzie , Frances S. Chance

Everything else being equal, simpler models should be preferred over more complex ones. In reinforcement learning (RL), simplicity is typically quantified on an action-by-action basis -- but this timescale ignores temporal regularities,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Tankred Saanum , Noémi Éltető , Peter Dayan , Marcel Binz , Eric Schulz