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Related papers: Quasimetric Value Functions with Dense Rewards

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Post-training has split large language model (LLM) alignment into two largely disconnected tracks. Online reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards drives emergent reasoning on math and code but depends on a programmatic verifier…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a well-established framework for sequential decision-making in complex environments. However, state-of-the-art Deep RL (DRL) algorithms typically require large training datasets and often struggle to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Celeste Veronese , Alessandro Farinelli , Daniele Meli

In classic Reinforcement Learning (RL), the agent maximizes an additive objective of the visited states, e.g., a value function. Unfortunately, objectives of this type cannot model many real-world applications such as experiment design,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Riccardo De Santi , Manish Prajapat , Andreas Krause

Reinforcement learning provides an automated framework for learning behaviors from high-level reward specifications, but in practice the choice of reward function can be crucial for good results -- while in principle the reward only needs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Abhishek Gupta , Aldo Pacchiano , Yuexiang Zhai , Sham M. Kakade , Sergey Levine

Long-term temporal credit assignment is an important challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). It refers to the ability of the agent to attribute actions to consequences that may occur after a long time interval. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Tanmay Gangwani , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents require the specification of a reward signal for learning behaviours. However, introduction of corrupt or stochastic rewards can yield high variance in learning. Such corruption may be a direct result of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-09 Joshua Romoff , Peter Henderson , Alexandre Piché , Vincent Francois-Lavet , Joelle Pineau

In this paper, we focus on the problem of inferring the underlying reward function of an expert given demonstrations, which is often referred to as inverse reinforcement learning (IRL). In particular, we propose a model-free density-based…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-10-03 Sungjoon Choi , Kyungjae Lee , Andy Park , Songhwai Oh

Reinforcement learning (RL) is attracting attention as an effective way to solve sequential optimization problems that involve high dimensional state/action space and stochastic uncertainties. Many such problems involve constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-01 Haeun Yoo , Victor M. Zavala , Jay H. Lee

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

When applying reinforcement learning (RL) to a new problem, reward engineering is a necessary, but often difficult and error-prone task a system designer has to face. To avoid this step, we propose LR4GPM, a novel (deep) RL method that can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-17 Junqi Qian , Paul Weng , Chenmien Tan

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a general framework concerned with an agent that seeks to maximize rewards in an environment. The learning typically happens through trial and error using explorative methods, such as epsilon-greedy. There are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Per-Arne Andersen , Morten Goodwin , Ole-Christoffer Granmo

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

Intrinsic rewards can improve exploration in reinforcement learning, but the exploration process may suffer from instability caused by non-stationary reward shaping and strong dependency on hyperparameters. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Lukas Schäfer , Filippos Christianos , Josiah P. Hanna , Stefano V. Albrecht

Large language models show strong potential for automated code generation, but lack guarantees for correctness, quality, safety, and domain-specific constraints. For instance in robotics, where code generation is increasingly being used for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Erfan Aghadavoodi Jolfaei , Daniel Maninger , Abhinav Anand , Mert Tiftikci , Mira Mezini

The reward signal plays a central role in defining the desired behaviors of agents in reinforcement learning (RL). Rewards collected from realistic environments could be perturbed, corrupted, or noisy due to an adversary, sensor error, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Xi Chen , Zhihui Zhu , Andrew Perrault

In reinforcement learning (RL), the goal is to obtain an optimal policy, for which the optimality criterion is fundamentally important. Two major optimality criteria are average and discounted rewards. While the latter is more popular, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-05 Vektor Dewanto , Marcus Gallagher

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Meng Cao , Lei Shu , Lei Yu , Yun Zhu , Nevan Wichers , Yinxiao Liu , Lei Meng

In goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL), sparse rewards present significant challenges, often obstructing efficient learning. Although multi-step GCRL can boost this efficiency, it can also lead to off-policy biases in target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-30 Lisheng Wu , Ke Chen

Reinforcement learning usually uses the feedback rewards of environmental to train agents. But the rewards in the actual environment are sparse, and even some environments will not rewards. Most of the current methods are difficult to get…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-13 Kai Jiang , XiaoLong Qin

In constrained reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to not only optimize the overall reward but also satisfy the additional safety, diversity, or budget constraints. Consequently, existing constrained RL solutions require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Chi Jin