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Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to infer an agent's preferences (represented as a reward function $R$) from their behaviour (represented as a policy $\pi$). To do this, we need a behavioural model of how $\pi$ relates to $R$. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Joar Skalse , Alessandro Abate

Reinforcement learning provides a powerful and general framework for decision making and control, but its application in practice is often hindered by the need for extensive feature and reward engineering. Deep reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-15 Justin Fu , Katie Luo , Sergey Levine

In human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning or environments where calculating a reward is expensive, the costly rewards can make learning efficiency challenging to achieve. The cost of obtaining feedback from humans or calculating expensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Muhammed Yusuf Satici , David L. Roberts

The standard formulation of Reinforcement Learning lacks a practical way of specifying what are admissible and forbidden behaviors. Most often, practitioners go about the task of behavior specification by manually engineering the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Julien Roy , Roger Girgis , Joshua Romoff , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Christopher Pal

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

Alignment is vital for safely deploying large language models (LLMs). Existing techniques are either reward-based (training a reward model on preference pairs and optimizing with reinforcement learning) or reward-free (directly fine-tuning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Ruoxi Cheng , Haoxuan Ma , Weixin Wang , Ranjie Duan , Jiexi Liu , Xiaoshuang Jia , Simeng Qin , Xiaochun Cao , Yang Liu , Xiaojun Jia

Learning to rank (LTR) plays a crucial role in various Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. Although supervised LTR methods based on fine-grained relevance labels (e.g., document-level annotations) have achieved significant success, their…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Yiteng Tu , Zhichao Xu , Tao Yang , Weihang Su , Yujia Zhou , Yiqun Liu , Fen Lin , Qin Liu , Qingyao Ai

Reinforcement learning is about learning agent models that make the best sequential decisions in unknown environments. In an unknown environment, the agent needs to explore the environment while exploiting the collected information, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Hong Qian , Yang Yu

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities but suffer from cognitive inefficiencies like "overthinking" simple problems and "underthinking" complex ones. While existing methods that use supervised fine-tuning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Tian Liang , Wenxiang Jiao , Zhiwei He , Jiahao Xu , Haitao Mi , Dong Yu

In reinforcement learning (RL), the consideration of multivariate reward signals has led to fundamental advancements in multi-objective decision-making, transfer learning, and representation learning. This work introduces the first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Harley Wiltzer , Jesse Farebrother , Arthur Gretton , Mark Rowland

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a computational approach to reward-driven learning in sequential decision problems. It implements the discovery of optimal actions by learning from an agent interacting with an environment rather than from…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-06 Mauricio Tec , Yunshan Duan , Peter Müller

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

Static feature exclusion strategies often fail to prevent bias when hidden dependencies influence the model predictions. To address this issue, we explore a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that integrates bias mitigation and automated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sudip Khadka , L. S. Paudel

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown its strength in challenging sequential decision-making problems. The reward function in RL is crucial to the learning performance, as it serves as a measure of the task completion degree. In real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Siyuan Li , Shijie Han , Yingnan Zhao , By Liang , Peng Liu

Reward hacking -- where RL agents exploit gaps in misspecified reward functions -- has been widely observed, but not yet systematically studied. To understand how reward hacking arises, we construct four RL environments with misspecified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Alexander Pan , Kush Bhatia , Jacob Steinhardt

In recent years significant progress has been made in dealing with challenging problems using reinforcement learning.Despite its great success, reinforcement learning still faces challenge in continuous control tasks. Conventional methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-04 Longxiang Shi , Shijian Li , Longbing Cao , Long Yang , Gang Zheng , Gang Pan

Designing effective reward functions remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), as it often requires extensive human effort and domain expertise. While RL from human feedback has been successful in aligning agents with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Tung Minh Luu , Younghwan Lee , Donghoon Lee , Sunho Kim , Min Jun Kim , Chang D. Yoo

The central challenge of reinforcement learning for reasoning lies not only in the sparsity of outcome-level supervision, but more fundamentally in how to transform feedback provided only at the end of a sequence into fine-grained learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Fei Ding , Yongkang Zhang , Runhao Liu , Yuhao Liao , Zijian Zeng , Sibo wang , Huiming Yang

Most artificial intelligence models have limiting ability to solve new tasks faster, without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. The recently emerging paradigm of continual learning aims to solve this issue, in which the model learns…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-01 Ju Xu , Zhanxing Zhu

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to train an agent from a reward function in a given environment, Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) seeks to recover the reward function from observing an expert's behavior. It is well known that, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Paul Rolland , Luca Viano , Norman Schuerhoff , Boris Nikolov , Volkan Cevher