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Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a widely used technique for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, yet it often suffers from sparse reward signals, making effective credit assignment challenging.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Meng Cao , Shuyuan Zhang , Xiao-Wen Chang , Doina Precup

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

Large language models are increasingly used for complex reasoning tasks where high-quality offline data such as expert-annotated solutions and distilled reasoning traces are often available. However, in environments with sparse rewards,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Yihao Liu , Shuocheng Li , Lang Cao , Yuhang Xie , Mengyu Zhou , Haoyu Dong , Xiaojun Ma , Shi Han , Dongmei Zhang

We adapt reinforcement learning (RL) methods for continuous control to bridge the gap between complete ignorance and perfect knowledge of the environment. Our method, Partial Knowledge Least Squares Policy Iteration (PLSPI), takes…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-03-27 Shuyuan Wang , Philip D. Loewen , Nathan P. Lawrence , Michael G. Forbes , R. Bhushan Gopaluni

We consider a problem of learning the reward and policy from expert examples under unknown dynamics. Our proposed method builds on the framework of generative adversarial networks and introduces the empowerment-regularized maximum-entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Ahmed H. Qureshi , Byron Boots , Michael C. Yip

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods with a high replay ratio (RR) and regularization have gained interest due to their superior sample efficiency. However, these methods have mainly been developed for dense-reward tasks. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Takuya Hiraoka

Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting challenge in deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Despite dramatic improvements have been made, the problem is far from being solved and is especially challenging in environments with sparse or delayed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Federico Malato , Ville Hautamaki

Actor critic methods with sparse rewards in model-based deep reinforcement learning typically require a deterministic binary reward function that reflects only two possible outcomes: if, for each step, the goal has been achieved or not. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Juan Vargas , Lazar Andjelic , Amir Barati Farimani

In semi-supervised representation learning frameworks, when the number of labelled data is very scarce, the quality and representativeness of these samples become increasingly important. Existing literature on semi-supervised learning…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Shuvendu Roy , Ali Etemad

Humans are spectacular reinforcement learners, constantly learning from and adjusting to experience and feedback. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily mean humans are fast learners. When tasks are challenging, learning can become…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Mark A. Rucker , Layne T. Watson , Matthew S. Gerber , Laura E. Barnes

We consider the problem of learning from sparse and underspecified rewards, where an agent receives a complex input, such as a natural language instruction, and needs to generate a complex response, such as an action sequence, while only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Rishabh Agarwal , Chen Liang , Dale Schuurmans , Mohammad Norouzi

Unsupervised reinforcement learning aims to acquire skills without prior goal representations, where an agent automatically explores an open-ended environment to represent goals and learn the goal-conditioned policy. However, this procedure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Jinxin Liu , Hao Shen , Donglin Wang , Yachen Kang , Qiangxing Tian

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) under sparse rewards remains fundamentally challenging because agents often fail to concentrate their influence, leading to insufficiently coordinated exploration. To address this, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yisak Park , Sunwoo Lee , Seungyul Han

We present AIRS: Automatic Intrinsic Reward Shaping that intelligently and adaptively provides high-quality intrinsic rewards to enhance exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). More specifically, AIRS selects shaping function from a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Mingqi Yuan , Bo Li , Xin Jin , Wenjun Zeng

Reward models (RMs) are a core component in the post-training of large language models (LLMs), serving as proxies for human preference evaluation and guiding model alignment. However, training reliable RMs under limited resources remains…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Dengcan Liu , Jiahao Li , Zheren Fu , Yi Tu , Jiajun Li , Zhendong Mao , Yongdong Zhang

Softmax with the cross entropy loss is the standard configuration for current neural classification models. The gold score for a target class is supposed to be 1, but it is never reachable under the softmax schema. Such a problem makes the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Qi Lv , Lei Geng , Ziqiang Cao , Min Cao , Sujian Li , Wenjie Li , Guohong Fu

Bayesian inference over the reward presents an ideal solution to the ill-posed nature of the inverse reinforcement learning problem. Unfortunately current methods generally do not scale well beyond the small tabular setting due to the need…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-15 Alex J. Chan , Mihaela van der Schaar

In user-agent interaction scenarios such as recommendation, brainstorming, and code suggestion, Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate sets of candidate recommendations where the objective is to maximize the collective utility of the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Rui Ai , Yu Pan , David Simchi-Levi , Chonghuan Wang

We propose a multi-agent distributed reinforcement learning algorithm that balances between potentially conflicting short-term reward and sparse, delayed long-term reward, and learns with partial information in a dynamic environment. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-06 Jing Tan , Ramin Khalili , Holger Karl

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang
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