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Related papers: Is there Value in Reinforcement Learning?

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Model-free reinforcement learning methods lack an inherent mechanism to impose behavioural constraints on the trained policies. Although certain extensions exist, they remain limited to specific types of constraints, such as value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Bram De Cooman , Johan Suykens

Interactive adaptive systems powered by Reinforcement Learning (RL) have many potential applications, such as intelligent tutoring systems. In such systems there is typically an external human system designer that is creating, monitoring…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-04-06 Ramtin Keramati , Emma Brunskill

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-06 Chengchun Shi , Zhengling Qi , Jianing Wang , Fan Zhou

Action-value estimation is a critical component of many reinforcement learning (RL) methods whereby sample complexity relies heavily on how fast a good estimator for action value can be learned. By viewing this problem through the lens of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Arash Tavakoli , Mehdi Fatemi , Petar Kormushev

We consider the problem of learning models for risk-sensitive reinforcement learning. We theoretically demonstrate that proper value equivalence, a method of learning models which can be used to plan optimally in the risk-neutral setting,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Tyler Kastner , Murat A. Erdogdu , Amir-massoud Farahmand

When function approximation is deployed in reinforcement learning (RL), the same problem may be formulated in different ways, often by treating a pre-processing step as a part of the environment or as part of the agent. As a consequence,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Nan Jiang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) can directly enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models without extensive reliance on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). In this work, we revisit the traditional Policy Gradient (PG) mechanism and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Xiangxiang Chu , Hailang Huang , Xiao Zhang , Fei Wei , Yong Wang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards has recently advanced the capabilities of Large Language Models in complex reasoning tasks by providing explicit rule-based supervision. Among RLVR methods, GRPO and its variants have achieved…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Zepeng Zhai , Meilin Chen , Jiaxuan Zhao , Junlang Qian , Lei Shen , Yuan Lu

In this paper, we argue that the prevailing approach to training and evaluating machine learning models often fails to consider their real-world application within organizational or societal contexts, where they are intended to create…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Burcu Sayin , Jie Yang , Xinyue Chen , Andrea Passerini , Fabio Casati

Reinforcement learning (RL) is about sequential decision making and is traditionally opposed to supervised learning (SL) and unsupervised learning (USL). In RL, given the current state, the agent makes a decision that may influence the next…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-03 Eric Benhamou

In this paper we argue for the fundamental importance of the value distribution: the distribution of the random return received by a reinforcement learning agent. This is in contrast to the common approach to reinforcement learning which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-24 Marc G. Bellemare , Will Dabney , Rémi Munos

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a general framework for adaptive control, which has proven to be efficient in many domains, e.g., board games, video games or autonomous vehicles. In such problems, an agent faces a sequential decision-making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Olivier Buffet , Olivier Pietquin , Paul Weng

Reinforcement learning (RL) requires access to a reward function that incentivizes the right behavior, but these are notoriously hard to specify for complex tasks. Preference-based RL provides an alternative: learning policies using a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-05 Kimin Lee , Laura Smith , Anca Dragan , Pieter Abbeel

Innate values describe agents' intrinsic motivations, which reflect their inherent interests and preferences for pursuing goals and drive them to develop diverse skills that satisfy their various needs. Traditional reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Qin Yang

This paper focuses on reinforcement learning (RL) with limited prior knowledge. In the domain of swarm robotics for instance, the expert can hardly design a reward function or demonstrate the target behavior, forbidding the use of both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-08-07 Riad Akrour , Marc Schoenauer , Michèle Sebag

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

Although recent model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have been shown to be capable of mastering complicated decision-making tasks, the sample complexity of these methods has remained a hurdle to utilizing them in many real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-21 Saeed Moazami , Peggy Doerschuk

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms suffer from the dependency on accurately engineered reward functions to properly guide the learning agents to do the required tasks. Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) addresses that by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Youssef Abdelkareem , Shady Shehata , Fakhri Karray

As a paradigm for sequential decision making in unknown environments, reinforcement learning (RL) has received a flurry of attention in recent years. However, the explosion of model complexity in emerging applications and the presence of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-22 Yuejie Chi , Yuxin Chen , Yuting Wei

In deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), value functions are typically approximated using deep neural networks and trained via mean squared error regression objectives to fit the true value functions. Recent research has proposed an alternative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Denis Tarasov , Kirill Brilliantov , Dmitrii Kharlapenko