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Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as multi-step decision-making agents, where effective reward design is essential for guiding learning. Although recent work explores various forms of reward shaping and step-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Dengjia Zhang , Xiaoou Liu , Lu Cheng , Yaqing Wang , Kenton Murray , Hua Wei

In this work, we take a first step toward elucidating the mechanisms behind emergent exploration in unsupervised reinforcement learning. We study Single-Goal Contrastive Reinforcement Learning (SGCRL), a self-supervised algorithm capable of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Mahsa Bastankhah , Grace Liu , Dilip Arumugam , Thomas L. Griffiths , Benjamin Eysenbach

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling self-improvement in large language models (LLMs). However, existing unsupervised RL-based methods often lack the capacity to adapt to the model's…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yiming Huang , Zhenbo Shi , Xin-Cheng Wen , Jichuan Zeng , Cuiyun Gao , Peiyi Han , Chuanyi Liu

Autonomous-driving research has recently embraced deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) as a promising framework for data-driven decision making, yet a clear picture of how these algorithms are currently employed, benchmarked and evaluated is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Elahe Delavari , Feeza Khan Khanzada , Jaerock Kwon

An appropriate reward function is of paramount importance in specifying a task in reinforcement learning (RL). Yet, it is known to be extremely challenging in practice to design a correct reward function for even simple tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-19 Dingwen Kong , Lin F. Yang

The goal of the Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) task is to identify the underlying reward function and the corresponding optimal policy from a set of expert demonstrations. While most IRL algorithms' theoretical guarantees rely on a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-25 Ruijia Zhang , Siliang Zeng , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

Controlled text generation tasks such as unsupervised text style transfer have increasingly adopted the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL). A major challenge in applying RL to such tasks is the sparse reward, which is available only after…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-19 Bhargav Upadhyay , Akhilesh Sudhakar , Arjun Maheswaran

We present a case study of model-free reinforcement learning (RL) framework to solve stochastic optimal control for a predefined parameter uncertainty distribution and partially observable system. We focus on robust optimal well control…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Atish Dixit , Ahmed H. ElSheikh

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are designed to optimize problem-solving by learning actions that maximize rewards, a task that becomes particularly challenging in random and nonstationary environments. Even advanced RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Sebastian Zieglmeier , Niklas Erdmann , Narada D. Warakagoda

Reward function is essential in reinforcement learning (RL), serving as the guiding signal to incentivize agents to solve given tasks, however, is also notoriously difficult to design. In many cases, only imperfect rewards are available,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Jianxiong Li , Xiao Hu , Haoran Xu , Jingjing Liu , Xianyuan Zhan , Qing-Shan Jia , Ya-Qin Zhang

In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Grigorii Veviurko , Wendelin Böhmer , Mathijs de Weerdt

Reward maximization, safe exploration, and intrinsic motivation are often studied as separate objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). We present a unified geometric framework, that views these goals as instances of a single optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Nikola Milosevic , Nico Scherf

Language model alignment is a critical step in training modern generative language models. Alignment targets to improve win rate of a sample from the aligned model against the base model. Today, we are increasingly using inference-time…

Language models can learn a range of capabilities from unsupervised training on text corpora. However, to solve a particular problem (such as text summarization) it is typically necessary to fine-tune them on a task-specific dataset. It is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Adam Gleave , Geoffrey Irving

Balancing exploration and exploitation is a fundamental part of reinforcement learning, yet most state-of-the-art algorithms use a naive exploration protocol like $\epsilon$-greedy. This contributes to the problem of high sample complexity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Tom Blau , Lionel Ott , Fabio Ramos

This paper studies tabular reinforcement learning (RL) in the hybrid setting, which assumes access to both an offline dataset and online interactions with the unknown environment. A central question boils down to how to efficiently utilize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Gen Li , Wenhao Zhan , Jason D. Lee , Yuejie Chi , Yuxin Chen

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is typically formulated as maximizing entropy subject to matching the distribution of expert trajectories. Classical (dual-ascent) IRL guarantees monotonic performance improvement but requires fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Anish Diwan , Davide Tateo , Christopher E. Mower , Haitham Bou-Ammar , Jan Peters , Oleg Arenz

We propose a reinforcement learning agent to solve hard exploration games by learning a range of directed exploratory policies. We construct an episodic memory-based intrinsic reward using k-nearest neighbors over the agent's recent…

Learning to solve tasks from a sparse reward signal is a major challenge for standard reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. However, in the real world, agents rarely need to solve sparse reward tasks entirely from scratch. More often, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-22 Qiyang Li , Jason Zhang , Dibya Ghosh , Amy Zhang , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning algorithms rely on carefully engineering environment rewards that are extrinsic to the agent. However, annotating each environment with hand-designed, dense rewards is not scalable, motivating the need for developing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-14 Yuri Burda , Harri Edwards , Deepak Pathak , Amos Storkey , Trevor Darrell , Alexei A. Efros