Related papers: Performance Optimization of Ratings-Based Reinforc…

This paper bridges some of the gap between optimal planning and reinforcement learning (RL), both of which share roots in dynamic programming applied to sequential decision making or optimal control. Whereas planning typically favors…

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is concerned with how intelligence agents take actions in a given environment to maximize the cumulative reward they receive. In healthcare, applying RL algorithms could assist patients in improving their health…

Zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) methods aim at instantly producing a behavior for an RL task in a given environment, from a description of the reward function. These methods are usually tested by evaluating their average performance…

Envisioned application areas for reinforcement learning (RL) include autonomous driving, precision agriculture, and finance, which all require RL agents to make decisions in the real world. A significant challenge hindering the adoption of…

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved groundbreaking successes in a wide variety of robotic applications. A natural consequence is the adoption of this paradigm for safety-critical tasks, where human safety and expensive hardware…

Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) methods such as RL$^2$ have emerged as promising approaches for learning data-efficient RL algorithms tailored to a given task distribution. However, they show poor asymptotic performance and struggle…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a popular paradigm for aligning models with human intent. Typically RLHF algorithms operate in two phases: first, use human preferences to learn a reward function and second,…

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) allows us to train models, such as language models (LMs), to follow complex human preferences. In RLHF for LMs, we first train an LM using supervised fine-tuning, sample pairs of responses,…

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) actively elicit user preferences to generate adaptive recommendations. Mainstream reinforcement learning-based CRS solutions heavily rely on handcrafted reward functions, which may not be aligned…

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of inferring a reward function from expert behavior. There are several approaches to IRL, but most are designed to learn a Markovian reward. However, a reward function might be…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a powerful framework to address the discrepancy between loss functions used during training and the final evaluation metrics to be used at test time. When applied to neural Machine Translation (MT), it…

Reinforcement learning has become a cornerstone for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models, where group-based approaches such as GRPO have emerged as efficient paradigms that optimize policies by leveraging…

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides a powerful paradigm to avoid meticulous reward engineering by learning rewards based on human preferences. However, real-time human feedback is hard to obtain in online tasks. Most…

Current advances in recommender systems have been remarkably successful in optimizing immediate engagement. However, long-term user engagement, a more desirable performance metric, remains difficult to improve. Meanwhile, recent…

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is typically formulated as maximizing entropy subject to matching the distribution of expert trajectories. Classical (dual-ascent) IRL guarantees monotonic performance improvement but requires fully…

Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) allows data-efficient learning which is required in real world applications such as robotics. However, despite the impressive data-efficiency, MBRL does not achieve the final performance of…

Reward functions are central in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding agents towards optimal decision-making. The complexity of RL tasks requires meticulously designed reward functions that effectively drive learning while avoiding…

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents optimize only the features specified in a reward function and are indifferent to anything left out inadvertently. This means that we must not only specify what to do, but also the much larger space of what…

Most reinforcement learning (RL) methods only focus on learning a single task from scratch and are not able to use prior knowledge to learn other tasks more effectively. Context-based meta RL techniques are recently proposed as a possible…