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Deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods often require many trials before convergence, and no direct interpretability of trained policies is provided. In order to achieve fast convergence and interpretability for the policy in RL, we…

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, a collection of agents learns to interact in a shared environment to achieve a common goal. We propose the use of reward machines (RM) -- Mealy machines used as structured representations…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Cyrus Neary , Zhe Xu , Bo Wu , Ufuk Topcu

This paper presents a novel approach to Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) that combines cooperative task decomposition with the learning of reward machines (RMs) encoding the structure of the sub-tasks. The proposed method helps…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Leo Ardon , Daniel Furelos-Blanco , Alessandra Russo

The success of reinforcement learning in typical settings is predicated on Markovian assumptions on the reward signal by which an agent learns optimal policies. In recent years, the use of reward machines has relaxed this assumption by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Taylor Dohmen , Noah Topper , George Atia , Andre Beckus , Ashutosh Trivedi , Alvaro Velasquez

Reward models (RMs) play a critical role in enhancing the reasoning performance of LLMs. For example, they can provide training signals to finetune LLMs during reinforcement learning (RL) and help select the best answer from multiple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Qiyuan Liu , Hao Xu , Xuhong Chen , Wei Chen , Yee Whye Teh , Ning Miao

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on thinking models that externalize intermediate steps and allocate extra test-time compute, with think-twice strategies showing that a deliberate second pass can elicit stronger reasoning. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Yizhu Jiao , Jiaqi Zeng , Julien Veron Vialard , Oleksii Kuchaiev , Jiawei Han , Olivier Delalleau

A key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is reward (mis)specification, whereby imprecisely defined reward functions can result in unintended, possibly harmful, behaviours. Indeed, reward functions in RL are typically treated as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Daniel Donnelly , Angelo Ferrando , Francesco Belardinelli

Reward models (RMs) are critical for aligning Large Language Models via Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). While Generative Reward Models (GRMs) achieve superior accuracy through chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, they incur…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Jiayun Wu , Peixu Hou , Shan Qu , Peng Zhang , Ning Gu , Tun Lu

This paper presents an approach for accelerated learning of optimal plans for a given task represented using Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) in multi-agent systems. Given a set of options (temporally abstract actions) available to each agent,…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Nishant Doshi

Non-markovian Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks are very hard to solve, because agents must consider the entire history of state-action pairs to act rationally in the environment. Most works use symbolic formalisms (as Linear Temporal Logic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Elena Umili , Francesco Argenziano , Roberto Capobianco

Reward machines are an established tool for dealing with reinforcement learning problems in which rewards are sparse and depend on complex sequences of actions. However, existing algorithms for learning reward machines assume an overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jan Corazza , Ivan Gavran , Daniel Neider

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

This paper investigates Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Model (LLM) agents in long-horizon, multi-turn scenarios. Although RL algorithms such as Group Relative Policy…

Human ability at solving complex tasks is helped by priors on object and event semantics of their environment. This paper investigates the use of similar prior knowledge for transfer learning in Reinforcement Learning agents. In particular,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-18 Samy Badreddine , Michael Spranger

Techniques that learn improved representations via offline data or self-supervised objectives have shown impressive results in traditional reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, it is unclear how improved representation learning can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Vaskar Nath , Dylan Slack , Jeff Da , Yuntao Ma , Hugh Zhang , Spencer Whitehead , Sean Hendryx

Reward is the driving force for reinforcement-learning agents. This paper is dedicated to understanding the expressivity of reward as a way to capture tasks that we would want an agent to perform. We frame this study around three new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-19 David Abel , Will Dabney , Anna Harutyunyan , Mark K. Ho , Michael L. Littman , Doina Precup , Satinder Singh

Long-horizon robotic manipulation remains challenging for reinforcement learning (RL) because sparse rewards provide limited guidance for credit assignment. Practical policy improvement thus relies on richer intermediate supervision, such…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Yiming Mao , Zixi Yu , Weixin Mao , Yinhao Li , Qirui Hu , Zihan Lan , Minzhao Zhu , Hua Chen

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms struggle with learning optimal policies for tasks where reward feedback is sparse and depends on a complex sequence of events in the environment. Probabilistic reward machines (PRMs) are finite-state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jan Corazza , Hadi Partovi Aria , Daniel Neider , Zhe Xu

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are highly sensitive to reward function specification, which remains a central challenge limiting their broad applicability. We present ARM-FM: Automated Reward Machines via Foundation Models, a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Roger Creus Castanyer , Faisal Mohamed , Pablo Samuel Castro , Cyrus Neary , Glen Berseth

Reward machines allow the definition of rewards for temporally extended tasks and behaviors. Specifying "informative" reward machines can be challenging. One way to address this is to generate reward machines from a high-level abstract…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Giovanni Varricchione , Natasha Alechina , Mehdi Dastani , Brian Logan