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Large language models (LLMs) exhibit an intriguing ability to learn a novel task from in-context examples presented in a demonstration, termed in-context learning (ICL). Understandably, a swath of research has been dedicated to uncovering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Jiaoda Li , Yifan Hou , Mrinmaya Sachan , Ryan Cotterell

Episodic tasks in Reinforcement Learning (RL) often pose challenges due to sparse reward signals and high-dimensional state spaces, which hinder efficient learning. Additionally, these tasks often feature hidden "trap states" --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Yuxuan Li , Yicheng Gao , Ning Yang , Stephen Xia

Neural sequence models based on the transformer architecture have demonstrated remarkable \emph{in-context learning} (ICL) abilities, where they can perform new tasks when prompted with training and test examples, without any parameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-07 Yu Bai , Fan Chen , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Song Mei

Transformer models have become foundational across a wide range of scientific and engineering domains due to their strong empirical performance. A key capability underlying their success is in-context learning (ICL): when presented with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Zhen Qin , Jiachen Jiang , Zhihui Zhu

As humans, our goals and our environment are persistently changing throughout our lifetime based on our experiences, actions, and internal and external drives. In contrast, typical reinforcement learning problem set-ups consider decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Annie Xie , James Harrison , Chelsea Finn

In order to understand the in-context learning phenomenon, recent works have adopted a stylized experimental framework and demonstrated that Transformers can learn gradient-based learning algorithms for various classes of real-valued…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Satwik Bhattamishra , Arkil Patel , Phil Blunsom , Varun Kanade

In this paper, a new reinforcement learning (RL) method known as the method of temporal differential is introduced. Compared to the traditional temporal-difference learning method, it plays a crucial role in developing novel RL techniques…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Tao Bian , Zhong-Ping Jiang

System optimal traffic routing can mitigate congestion by assigning routes for a portion of vehicles so that the total travel time of all vehicles in the transportation system can be reduced. However, achieving real-time optimal routing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Zemian Ke , Qiling Zou , Jiachao Liu , Sean Qian

Transferring high-level knowledge from a source task to a target task is an effective way to expedite reinforcement learning (RL). For example, propositional logic and first-order logic have been used as representations of such knowledge.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-09-11 Zhe Xu , Ufuk Topcu

Current reinforcement learning (RL) in robotics often experiences difficulty in generalizing to new downstream tasks due to the innate task-specific training paradigm. To alleviate it, unsupervised RL, a framework that pre-trains the agent…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Daesol Cho , Jigang Kim , H. Jin Kim

In-Context Reinforcement Learning (ICRL) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to learn online from external rewards directly within the context window. However, a central challenge in ICRL is reward estimation, as models typically lack…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Wenxuan Jiang , Yuxin Zuo , Zijian Zhang , Xuecheng Wu , Zining Fan , Wenxuan Liu , Li Chen , Xiaoyu Li , Xuezhi Cao , Xiaolong Jin , Ninghao Liu

Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) share many commonalities, including an agent who learns while interacts, a long-term and complex goal, and an algorithm that explores and adapts. To successfully apply…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Limin Chen , Zhiwen Tang , Grace Hui Yang

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach to solving complex robotics problems. However, the process of learning through trial-and-error interactions is often highly time-consuming, despite recent advancements in RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Julia Tan , Ransalu Senanayake , Fabio Ramos

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at in-context learning (ICL), a supervised learning technique that relies on adding annotated examples to the model context. We investigate a contextual bandit version of in-context reinforcement learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Giovanni Monea , Antoine Bosselut , Kianté Brantley , Yoav Artzi

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated potential in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but such training typically demands substantial efforts in creating and annotating data. In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Hangfan Zhang , Siyuan Xu , Zhimeng Guo , Huaisheng Zhu , Shicheng Liu , Xinrun Wang , Qiaosheng Zhang , Yang Chen , Peng Ye , Lei Bai , Shuyue Hu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become an increasingly active area of research in recent years. Although there are many algorithms that allow an agent to solve tasks efficiently, they often ignore the possibility that prior experience…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-01-07 Francisco M. Garcia , Chris Nota , Philip S. Thomas

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a general framework concerned with an agent that seeks to maximize rewards in an environment. The learning typically happens through trial and error using explorative methods, such as epsilon-greedy. There are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Per-Arne Andersen , Morten Goodwin , Ole-Christoffer Granmo

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms face two distinct challenges: learning effective representations of past and present observations, and determining how actions influence future returns. Both challenges involve modeling long-term…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Tianwei Ni , Michel Ma , Benjamin Eysenbach , Pierre-Luc Bacon

The function approximators employed by traditional image-based Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms usually lack a temporal learning component and instead focus on learning the spatial component. We propose a technique, Temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Deepak George Thomas , Tichakorn Wongpiromsarn , Ali Jannesari

Pretraining reinforcement learning (RL) models on offline datasets is a promising way to improve their training efficiency in online tasks, but challenging due to the inherent mismatch in dynamics and behaviors across various tasks. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Minting Pan , Yitao Zheng , Yunbo Wang , Xiaokang Yang