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Reinforcement learning (RL) applications, where an agent can simply learn optimal behaviors by interacting with the environment, are quickly gaining tremendous success in a wide variety of applications from controlling simple pendulums to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-28 Mariam Kiran , Melis Ozyildirim

Dealing with environments with sparse rewards has always been crucial for systems developed to operate in autonomous open-ended learning settings. Intrinsic Motivations could be an effective way to help Deep Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Gianluca Maselli , Vieri Giuliano Santucci

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for robotic path planning in uncertain environments. However, the control policies trained for an RL agent crucially depend on user-defined, state-based reward functions. Poorly designed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Anand Balakrishnan , Stefan Jakšić , Edgar A. Aguilar , Dejan Ničković , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

Designing suitable rewards poses a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), especially for embodied manipulation. Trajectory success rewards are suitable for human judges or model fitting, but the sparsity severely limits RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Xin Liu , Yixuan Li , Yuhui Chen , Yuxing Qin , Haoran Li , Dongbin Zhao

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been credited as the key advance that has allowed Large Language Models (LLMs) to effectively follow instructions and produce useful assistance. Classically, this involves generating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-02 Alex J. Chan , Hao Sun , Samuel Holt , Mihaela van der Schaar

Deep learning has achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning (RL) problems when dense reward function is provided. However, in sparse reward environment it still often suffers from the need to carefully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Hao Liu , Alexander Trott , Richard Socher , Caiming Xiong

Specifying reward functions for complex tasks like object manipulation or driving is challenging to do by hand. Reward learning seeks to address this by learning a reward model using human feedback on selected query policies. This shifts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Kush Bhatia , Wenshuo Guo , Jacob Steinhardt

The success of many RL techniques heavily relies on human-engineered dense rewards, which typically demand substantial domain expertise and extensive trial and error. In our work, we propose DrS (Dense reward learning from Stages), a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-26 Tongzhou Mu , Minghua Liu , Hao Su

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is increasingly applied to large-scale decision-making problems like logistics, scheduling, and recommender systems, but existing algorithms struggle with the curse of dimensionality in such large discrete action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Heiko Hoppe , Fabian Akkerman , Wouter van Heeswijk , Maximilian Schiffer

Most conventional Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms aim to optimize decision-making rules in terms of the expected returns. However, especially for risk management purposes, other risk-sensitive criteria such as the value-at-risk or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-19 Tetsuro Morimura , Masashi Sugiyama , Hisashi Kashima , Hirotaka Hachiya , Toshiyuki Tanaka

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has catalyzed significant breakthroughs in complex LLM reasoning within verifiable domains, such as mathematics and programming. Recent efforts have sought to extend this paradigm to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Zheng Zhang , Ao Lu , Yuanhao Zeng , Ziwei Shan , Jinjin Guo , Lufei Li , Yexin Li , Kan Ren

While combining imitation learning (IL) and reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising way to address poor sample efficiency in autonomous behavior acquisition, methods that do so typically assume that the requisite behavior demonstrations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Caroline Wang , Garrett Warnell , Peter Stone

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is one of the most powerful tools for synthesizing complex robotic behaviors. But training DRL models is incredibly compute and memory intensive, requiring large training datasets and replay buffers to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Lev Grossman , Brian Plancher

Reinforcement learning (RL), particularly its combination with deep neural networks referred to as deep RL (DRL), has shown tremendous promise across a wide range of applications, suggesting its potential for enabling the development of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Chen Tang , Ben Abbatematteo , Jiaheng Hu , Rohan Chandra , Roberto Martín-Martín , Peter Stone

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) can acquire complex behaviors from low-level inputs, such as images. However, real-world applications of such methods require generalizing to the vast variability of the real world. Deep networks are known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-13 Chelsea Finn , Tianhe Yu , Justin Fu , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in text generation to alleviate the exposure bias issue or to utilize non-parallel datasets. The reward function plays an important role in making RL training successful. However, previous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-19 Yongchang Hao , Yuxin Liu , Lili Mou

The potential of reinforcement learning (RL) to deliver aligned and performant agents is partially bottlenecked by the reward engineering problem. One alternative to heuristic trial-and-error is preference-based RL (PbRL), where a reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Tom Bewley , Freddy Lecue

We provide an original theoretical study of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) through the lens of reward compatibility, a novel framework to quantify the compatibility of a reward with the given expert's demonstrations. Intuitively, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Filippo Lazzati , Mirco Mutti , Alberto Metelli

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) aligns a robot behavior with human preferences via a reward function learned from binary feedback over agent behaviors. We show that dynamics-aware reward functions improve the sample…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-29 Katherine Metcalf , Miguel Sarabia , Natalie Mackraz , Barry-John Theobald

In high-dimensional state spaces, the usefulness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) is limited by the problem of exploration. This issue has been addressed using potential-based reward shaping (PB-RS) previously. In the present work, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-15 Ingmar Schubert , Ozgur S. Oguz , Marc Toussaint