Related papers: Reward Machines for Deep RL in Noisy and Uncertain…

Natural and formal languages provide an effective mechanism for humans to specify instructions and reward functions. We investigate how to generate policies via RL when reward functions are specified in a symbolic language captured by…

Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) models are vulnerable in various noisy scenarios. For instance, the observed reward channel is often subject to noise in practice (e.g., when rewards are collected through sensors),…

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods usually treat reward functions as black boxes. As such, these methods must extensively interact with the environment in order to discover rewards and optimal policies. In most RL applications, however,…

Robustness to noise is of utmost importance in reinforcement learning systems, particularly in military contexts where high stakes and uncertain environments prevail. Noise and uncertainty are inherent features of military operations,…

Reward machines (RMs) are automata structures that encode (non-Markovian) reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL). RMs can reward any behaviour representable in regular languages and, when paired with RL algorithms that exploit RM…

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,…

Recent studies on post-training large language models (LLMs) for reasoning through reinforcement learning (RL) typically focus on tasks that can be accurately verified and rewarded, such as solving math problems. In contrast, our research…

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

A key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is reward (mis)specification, whereby imprecisely defined reward functions can result in unintended, possibly harmful, behaviours. Indeed, reward functions in RL are typically treated as…

Non-markovian Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks are very hard to solve, because agents must consider the entire history of state-action pairs to act rationally in the environment. Most works use symbolic formalisms (as Linear Temporal Logic…

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents continually interact with the environment and use the feedback to refine their behavior. To guide policy optimization, reward models are introduced as proxies of the desired objectives, such that when…

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…

This paper presents PROB-IRM, an approach that learns robust reward machines (RMs) for reinforcement learning (RL) agents from noisy execution traces. The key aspect of RM-driven RL is the exploitation of a finite-state machine that…

Reward Machines (RMs) are an established mechanism in Reinforcement Learning (RL) to represent and learn sparse, temporally extended tasks with non-Markovian rewards. RMs rely on high-level information in the form of labels that are emitted…

Recent work has shown that deep reinforcement-learning agents can learn to follow language-like instructions from infrequent environment rewards. However, this places on environment designers the onus of designing language-conditional…

Reward machines (RMs) provide a structured way to specify non-Markovian rewards in reinforcement learning (RL), thereby improving both expressiveness and programmability. Viewed more broadly, they separate what is known about the…

In recent years, a variety of tasks have been accomplished by deep reinforcement learning (DRL). However, when applying DRL to tasks in a real-world environment, designing an appropriate reward is difficult. Rewards obtained via actual…

Although Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has achieved notable success in numerous robotic applications, designing a high-performing reward function remains a challenging task that often requires substantial manual input. Recently, Large…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become central to post-training reasoning models, yet a key limitation of existing studies is their narrow view of the reasoning space: difficulty is treated as reasoning depth…

Reward machines (RMs) are a recent formalism for representing the reward function of a reinforcement learning task through a finite-state machine whose edges encode subgoals of the task using high-level events. The structure of RMs enables…