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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

The ability of reinforcement learning algorithms to learn effective policies is determined by the rewards available during training. However, for practical problems, obtaining large quantities of reward labels is often infeasible due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Shreyas Chaudhari , Renhao Zhang , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

"High Quality Related Search Query Suggestions" task aims at recommending search queries which are real, accurate, diverse, relevant and engaging. Obtaining large amounts of query-quality human annotations is expensive. Prior work on…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-08-11 Praveen Kumar Bodigutla

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated strong potential in training large language models (LLMs) capable of complex reasoning for real-world problem solving. More recently, RL has been leveraged to create sophisticated LLM-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Bowen Jin , Jinsung Yoon , Priyanka Kargupta , Sercan O. Arik , Jiawei Han

Reward shaping is one of the most effective methods to tackle the crucial yet challenging problem of credit assignment in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, designing shaping functions usually requires much expert knowledge and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-29 Haosheng Zou , Tongzheng Ren , Dong Yan , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

Extrinsic rewards can effectively guide reinforcement learning (RL) agents in specific tasks. However, extrinsic rewards frequently fall short in complex environments due to the significant human effort needed for their design and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Mingqi Yuan , Roger Creus Castanyer , Bo Li , Xin Jin , Wenjun Zeng , Glen Berseth

Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the careful design of the reward function. However, accurately assigning rewards to each state-action pair in Long-Term Reinforcement Learning (LTRL) tasks remains a significant challenge. As a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Qi Ju , Falin Hei , Zhemei Fang , Yunfeng Luo

The effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in continuous control robotics tasks is mainly dependent on the design of the underlying reward function, which is highly prone to reward hacking. A misalignment between the reward…

This paper reviews exploration techniques in deep reinforcement learning. Exploration techniques are of primary importance when solving sparse reward problems. In sparse reward problems, the reward is rare, which means that the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Pawel Ladosz , Lilian Weng , Minwoo Kim , Hyondong Oh

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems can be complex and non-interpretable, making it challenging for non-AI experts to understand or intervene in their decisions. This is due in part to the sequential nature of RL in which actions are chosen…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Amal Alabdulkarim , Madhuri Singh , Gennie Mansi , Kaely Hall , Upol Ehsan , Mark O. Riedl

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a branch of machine learning which is employed to solve various sequential decision making problems without proper supervision. Due to the recent advancement of deep learning, the newly proposed Deep-RL…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-04-17 Dhruv Ramani

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate transformative potential, yet their reasoning remains inconsistent and unreliable. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning is a key mechanism for improvement, but its effectiveness is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Pei-Chi Pan , Yingbin Liang , Sen Lin

Assigning resources in business processes execution is a repetitive task that can be effectively automated. However, different automation methods may give varying results that may not be optimal. Proper resource allocation is crucial as it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-02 Kamil Żbikowski , Michał Ostapowicz , Piotr Gawrysiak

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

Recent work has shown that deep reinforcement-learning agents can learn to follow language-like instructions from infrequent environment rewards. However, this places on environment designers the onus of designing language-conditional…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-12-24 Dzmitry Bahdanau , Felix Hill , Jan Leike , Edward Hughes , Arian Hosseini , Pushmeet Kohli , Edward Grefenstette

A central belief in scaling reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards for instruction following (IF) tasks is that, a diverse mixture of verifiable hard and unverifiable soft constraints is essential for generalizing to unseen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Yirong Zeng , Yufei Liu , Xiao Ding , Yutai Hou , Yuxian Wang , Haonan Song , Wu Ning , Dandan Tu , Qixun Zhang , Bibo Cai , Yuxiang He , Ting Liu

A misspecified reward can degrade sample efficiency and induce undesired behaviors in reinforcement learning (RL) problems. We propose symbolic reward machines for incorporating high-level task knowledge when specifying the reward signals.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-22 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

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

In this paper we consider reinforcement learning tasks with progressive rewards; that is, tasks where the rewards tend to increase in magnitude over time. We hypothesise that this property may be problematic for value-based deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-30 Michael Dann , John Thangarajah

In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Kianté Brantley , Hal Daumé , Miroslav Dudik , Robert Schapire