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Designing optimal reward functions has been desired but extremely difficult in reinforcement learning (RL). When it comes to modern complex tasks, sophisticated reward functions are widely used to simplify policy learning yet even a tiny…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Ning Wei , Jiahua Liang , Di Xie , Shiliang Pu

The problem of reinforcement learning is considered where the environment or the model undergoes a change. An algorithm is proposed that an agent can apply in such a problem to achieve the optimal long-time discounted reward. The algorithm…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-25 Wuxia Chen , Taposh Banerjee , Jemin George , Carl Busart

The use of Potential-Based Reward Shaping (PBRS) has shown great promise in the ongoing research effort to tackle sample inefficiency in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, choosing the right potential function remains an open challenge.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Giuseppe Canonaco , Leo Ardon , Alberto Pozanco , Daniel Borrajo

Diffusion models excel at modeling complex data distributions, including those of images, proteins, and small molecules. However, in many cases, our goal is to model parts of the distribution that maximize certain properties: for example,…

Reinforcement learning optimizes policies for expected cumulative reward. Need the supervision be so narrow? Reward is delayed and sparse for many tasks, making it a difficult and impoverished signal for end-to-end optimization. To augment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-10 Evan Shelhamer , Parsa Mahmoudieh , Max Argus , Trevor Darrell

Designing dense rewards is crucial for reinforcement learning (RL), yet in robotics it often demands extensive manual effort and lacks scalability. One promising solution is to view task progress as a dense reward signal, as it quantifies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Yuyang Liu , Chuan Wen , Yihang Hu , Dinesh Jayaraman , Yang Gao

Reward models have become a staple in modern NLP, serving as not only a scalable text evaluator, but also an indispensable component in many alignment recipes and inference-time algorithms. However, while recent reward models increase…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Zhaofeng Wu , Michihiro Yasunaga , Andrew Cohen , Yoon Kim , Asli Celikyilmaz , Marjan Ghazvininejad

Chain-of-thought reasoning enables large language models to solve multi-step tasks by framing problem solving as sequential decision problems. Outcome-based rewards, which provide feedback only on final answers, show impressive success, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Tarun Chitra

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a key paradigm for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, yet the reward models at its core remain largely opaque. In this work, we present Sparse Autoencoder For…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Wei Shi , Ziyuan Xie , Sihang Li , Xiang Wang

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Simone Parisi , Davide Tateo , Maximilian Hensel , Carlo D'Eramo , Jan Peters , Joni Pajarinen

Multi-goal reinforcement learning (RL) aims to qualify the agent to accomplish multi-goal tasks, which is of great importance in learning scalable robotic manipulation skills. However, reward engineering always requires strenuous efforts in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Deyu Yang , Hanbo Zhang , Xuguang Lan , Jishiyu Ding

Designing an effective reward function has long been a challenge in reinforcement learning, particularly for complex tasks in unstructured environments. To address this, various learning paradigms have emerged that leverage different forms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Muhammad Qasim Elahi , Somtochukwu Oguchienti , Maheed H. Ahmed , Mahsa Ghasemi

Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Cevahir Koprulu , Ufuk Topcu

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

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 from human feedback usually models preferences using a reward function that does not distinguish between people. We argue that this is unlikely to be a good design choice in contexts with high potential for…

Learning effective policies for sparse objectives is a key challenge in Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). A common approach is to design task-related dense rewards to improve task learnability. While such rewards are easily interpreted,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-12 Hassam Sheikh , Shauharda Khadka , Santiago Miret , Somdeb Majumdar

This paper studies offline reinforcement learning with linear function approximation in a setting with decision-theoretic, but not estimation sparsity. The structural restrictions of the data-generating process presume that the transitions…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-01-24 Angela Zhou

Reward design is a fundamental, yet challenging aspect of reinforcement learning (RL). Researchers typically utilize feedback signals from the environment to handcraft a reward function, but this process is not always effective due to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Alexander Bukharin , Yixiao Li , Pengcheng He , Tuo Zhao

Reinforcement learning is a powerful learning paradigm in which agents can learn to maximize sparse and delayed reward signals. Although RL has had many impressive successes in complex domains, learning can take hours, days, or even years…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Paniz Behboudian , Yash Satsangi , Matthew E. Taylor , Anna Harutyunyan , Michael Bowling