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Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) replaces reward values in traditional reinforcement learning by preferences to better elicit human opinion on the target objective, especially when numerical reward values are hard to design or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Yichong Xu , Ruosong Wang , Lin F. Yang , Aarti Singh , Artur Dubrawski

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms suffer from the dependency on accurately engineered reward functions to properly guide the learning agents to do the required tasks. Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) addresses that by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Youssef Abdelkareem , Shady Shehata , Fakhri Karray

Large language models (LLMs) typically receive diverse natural language (NL) feedback through interaction with the environment. However, current reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms rely solely on scalar rewards, leaving the rich…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Lei Huang , Xiang Cheng , Chenxiao Zhao , Guobin Shen , Junjie Yang , Xiaocheng Feng , Yuxuan Gu , Xing Yu , Bing Qin

Residual reinforcement learning (RL) has been proposed as a way to solve challenging robotic tasks by adapting control actions from a conventional feedback controller to maximize a reward signal. We extend the residual formulation to learn…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Minttu Alakuijala , Gabriel Dulac-Arnold , Julien Mairal , Jean Ponce , Cordelia Schmid

Auxiliary Learning (AL) is a form of multi-task learning in which a model trains on auxiliary tasks to boost performance on a primary objective. While AL has improved generalization across domains such as navigation, image classification,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Judah Goldfeder , Matthew So , Hod Lipson

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

Current image-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically operate on the whole image without performing object-level reasoning. This leads to inefficient goal sampling and ineffective reward functions. In this paper, we improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-16 Yufei Wang , Gautham Narayan Narasimhan , Xingyu Lin , Brian Okorn , David Held

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be effective in many scenarios. However, it typically requires the exploration of a sufficiently large number of state-action pairs, some of which may be unsafe. Consequently, its application to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-06-24 Yousef Emam , Gennaro Notomista , Paul Glotfelter , Zsolt Kira , Magnus Egerstedt

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of inferring a reward function from expert behavior. There are several approaches to IRL, but most are designed to learn a Markovian reward. However, a reward function might be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Noah Topper , Alvaro Velasquez , George Atia

Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) is a powerful and practical approach for learning sequential decision-making policies. Different from Reinforcement Learning (RL), GAIL takes advantage of demonstration data by experts (e.g.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-14 Minshuo Chen , Yizhou Wang , Tianyi Liu , Zhuoran Yang , Xingguo Li , Zhaoran Wang , Tuo Zhao

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves multimodal reasoning by rewarding verifiable final answers. Yet answer-correct trajectories may still rely on incomplete derivations, weak evidence, or statements that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Mengzhao Jia , Zhihan Zhang , Meng Jiang

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) is a paradigm in which an RL agent learns to optimize a task using pair-wise preference-based feedback over trajectories, rather than explicit reward signals. While PbRL has demonstrated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Wenhao Zhan , Masatoshi Uehara , Wen Sun , Jason D. Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard paradigm for refining large language models (LLMs) beyond pre-training and instruction tuning. A prominent line of work is RL with verifiable rewards (RLVR), which leverages automatically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Bonan Zhang , Zhongqi Chen , Bowen Song , Qinya Li , Fan Wu , Guihai Chen

Bilevel reinforcement learning (RL), which features intertwined two-level problems, has attracted growing interest recently. The inherent non-convexity of the lower-level RL problem is, however, to be an impediment to developing bilevel…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-28 Yan Yang , Bin Gao , Ya-xiang Yuan

Although reinforcement learning (RL) has tremendous success in many fields, applying RL to real-world settings such as healthcare is challenging when the reward is hard to specify and no exploration is allowed. In this work, we focus on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-15 Chun-Hao Chang , George Alexandru Adam , Rich Caruana , Anna Goldenberg

A major challenge of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world applications is the variation between environments, tasks or clients. Meta-RL (MRL) addresses this issue by learning a meta-policy that adapts to new tasks. Standard MRL methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Ido Greenberg , Shie Mannor , Gal Chechik , Eli Meirom

Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms exhibit broad generality in their theoretical formulation and high performance on several challenging domains when combined with powerful function approximation. However, developing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Joseph Modayil , Zaheer Abbas

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Rui Yu , Shenghua Wan , Yucen Wang , Chen-Xiao Gao , Le Gan , Zongzhang Zhang , De-Chuan Zhan

Learning generalist embodied agents, able to solve multitudes of tasks in different domains is a long-standing problem. Reinforcement learning (RL) is hard to scale up as it requires a complex reward design for each task. In contrast,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Pietro Mazzaglia , Tim Verbelen , Bart Dhoedt , Aaron Courville , Sai Rajeswar