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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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-10 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

In this paper, we study the optimal dividend problem under the continuous time diffusion model with the bounded dividend rate from the Reinforcement Learning (RL) perspective. Unlike the standard literature, our main focus will be on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-30 Lihua Bai , Thejani Gamage , Jin Ma , Gaozhan Wang

Reinforcement Learning algorithms aim to learn optimal control strategies through iterative interactions with an environment. A critical element in this process is the experience replay buffer, which stores past experiences, allowing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Hoda Yamani , Yuning Xing , Lee Violet C. Ong , Bruce A. MacDonald , Henry Williams

Reinforcement learning (RL) shows promise for enhancing LLM agentic reasoning, yet sparse terminal rewards hinder fine-grained optimization. Process reward modeling offers an alternative but incurs high computational costs, reward hacking…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Xiao Feng , Bo Han , Zhanke Zhou , Jiaqi Fan , Jiangchao Yao , Ka Ho Li , Dahai Yu , Michael Kwok-Po Ng

This paper introduces an approach to Reinforcement Learning Algorithm by comparing their immediate rewards using a variation of Q-Learning algorithm. Unlike the conventional Q-Learning, the proposed algorithm compares current reward with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2010-09-15 Punit Pandey , Deepshikha Pandey , Shishir Kumar

A central challenge in reinforcement learning is discovering effective policies for tasks where rewards are sparsely distributed. We postulate that in the absence of useful reward signals, an effective exploration strategy should seek out…

Search agents powered by large language models can autonomously decompose queries, retrieve information, and synthesize answers through multi-step reasoning. However, the rapid growth of training methods has outpaced controlled comparison:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yibo Zhao , Zichen Ding , Jiayi Wu , Zun Wang , Xiang Li

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for those tasks where rewards from environments are sparse. A commonly used approach for exploring such environments is to introduce some "intrinsic"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Neale Ratzlaff , Qinxun Bai , Li Fuxin , Wei Xu

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

Solving tasks with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in reinforcement learning. In the single-agent setting, this challenge is addressed by introducing intrinsic rewards that motivate agents to explore unseen regions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

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

Reinforcement-learning agents seek to maximize a reward signal through environmental interactions. As humans, our job in the learning process is to design reward functions to express desired behavior and enable the agent to learn such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Zhiyuan Zhou , Shreyas Sundara Raman , Henry Sowerby , Michael L. Littman

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach to enhance task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. However, existing RL methods tend to mainly focus on generation tasks, such as dialogue policy learning (DPL) or response generation (RG),…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Huifang Du , Shuqin Li , Minghao Wu , Xuejing Feng , Yuan-Fang Li , Haofen Wang

Successfully navigating a complex environment to obtain a desired outcome is a difficult task, that up to recently was believed to be capable only by humans. This perception has been broken down over time, especially with the introduction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Joshua Hare

To achieve the ambitious goals of artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning must include planning with a model of the world that is abstract in state and time. Deep learning has made progress with state abstraction, but temporal…

In many RL applications, once training ends, it is vital to detect any deterioration in the agent performance as soon as possible. Furthermore, it often has to be done without modifying the policy and under minimal assumptions regarding the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-01 Ido Greenberg , Shie Mannor

We propose a multi-agent distributed reinforcement learning algorithm that balances between potentially conflicting short-term reward and sparse, delayed long-term reward, and learns with partial information in a dynamic environment. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-06 Jing Tan , Ramin Khalili , Holger Karl

One of the bottlenecks preventing Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms (DRL) from real-world applications is how to explore the environment and collect informative transitions efficiently. The present paper describes bounded exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Ting Qiao , Henry Williams , David Valencia , Bruce MacDonald

Diffusion-based large language models offer a non-autoregressive alternative for text generation, but enabling them to perform complex reasoning remains challenging. Reinforcement learning has recently emerged as an effective post-training…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Shaoan Xie , Lingjing Kong , Xiangchen Song , Xinshuai Dong , Guangyi Chen , Eric P. Xing , Kun Zhang

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