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Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. However, RLHF is susceptible to \emph{reward hacking}, where the agent exploits flaws in the reward function rather…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Jiayi Fu , Xuandong Zhao , Chengyuan Yao , Heng Wang , Qi Han , Yanghua Xiao

Document summarisation can be formulated as a sequential decision-making problem, which can be solved by Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. The predominant RL paradigm for summarisation learns a cross-input policy, which requires…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-07-31 Yang Gao , Christian M. Meyer , Mohsen Mesgar , Iryna Gurevych

Rewards play a crucial role in reinforcement learning. To arrive at the desired policy, the design of a suitable reward function often requires significant domain expertise as well as trial-and-error. Here, we aim to minimize the effort…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-18 Zheng Wu , Wenzhao Lian , Vaibhav Unhelkar , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Stefan Schaal

While large language models excel in diverse domains, their performance on complex longhorizon agentic decision-making tasks remains limited. Most existing methods concentrate on designing effective reward models (RMs) to advance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Zhicong Lu , Zichuan Lin , Wei Jia , Changyuan Tian , Deheng Ye , Peiguang Li , Li Jin , Nayu Liu , Guangluan Xu , Wei Feng

Assisted by neural networks, reinforcement learning agents have been able to solve increasingly complex tasks over the last years. The simulation environment in which the agents interact is an essential component in any reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-03 Aqeel Labash , Ardi Tampuu , Tambet Matiisen , Jaan Aru , Raul Vicente

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

Sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) requires to predict the action of a person based on sensor-generated time series data. HAR has attracted major interest in the past few years, thanks to the large number of applications enabled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Davide Buffelli , Fabio Vandin

Agentic reasoning models trained with multimodal reinforcement learning (MMRL) have become increasingly capable, yet they are almost universally optimized using sparse, outcome-based rewards computed based on the final answers. Richer…

Text-based games are a popular testbed for language-based reinforcement learning (RL). In previous work, deep Q-learning is commonly used as the learning agent. Q-learning algorithms are challenging to apply to complex real-world domains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Weichen Li , Rati Devidze , Sophie Fellenz

Sampling is ubiquitous in machine learning methodologies. Due to the growth of large datasets and model complexity, we want to learn and adapt the sampling process while training a representation. Towards achieving this grand goal, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-14 Jason Xiaotian Dou , Alvin Qingkai Pan , Runxue Bao , Haiyi Harry Mao , Lei Luo , Zhi-Hong Mao

\Episode-based reinforcement learning (ERL) algorithms treat reinforcement learning (RL) as a black-box optimization problem where we learn to select a parameter vector of a controller, often represented as a movement primitive, for a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Fabian Otto , Onur Celik , Hongyi Zhou , Hanna Ziesche , Ngo Anh Vien , Gerhard Neumann

For adversarial imitation learning algorithms (AILs), no true rewards are obtained from the environment for learning the strategy. However, the pseudo rewards based on the output of the discriminator are still required. Given the implicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-15 Yawei Wang , Xiu Li

Reward function design and exploration time are arguably the biggest obstacles to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real world. In many real-world tasks, designing a reward function takes considerable hand…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-06-14 Pierre Sermanet , Kelvin Xu , Sergey Levine

Evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems traditionally relies on hand annotations for input queries, passages to retrieve, and responses to generate. We introduce ARES, an Automated RAG Evaluation System, for evaluating RAG…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Jon Saad-Falcon , Omar Khattab , Christopher Potts , Matei Zaharia

Recent advances in learnable reward shaping have shown promise in single-agent reinforcement learning by automatically discovering effective feedback signals. However, the effectiveness of decentralized learnable reward shaping in…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Aditya Akella

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 reasoning models (LRMs) achieve impressive reasoning capabilities by generating lengthy chain-of-thoughts, but this "overthinking" incurs high latency and cost without commensurate accuracy gains. In this work, we introduce AALC, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Ruosen Li , Ziming Luo , Quan Zhang , Ruochen Li , Ben Zhou , Ali Payani , Xinya Du

Reward shaping is effective in addressing the sparse-reward challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) by providing immediate feedback through auxiliary, informative rewards. Based on the reward shaping strategy, we propose a novel multi-task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Haozhe Ma , Zhengding Luo , Thanh Vinh Vo , Kuankuan Sima , Tze-Yun Leong

Large language model alignment via reinforcement learning depends critically on reward function quality. However, static, domain-specific reward models are often costly to train and exhibit poor generalization in out-of-distribution…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Andrew Zhuoer Feng , Cunxiang Wang , Bosi Wen , Yidong Wang , Yu Luo , Hongning Wang , Minlie Huang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to be often unsuccessful in environments with sparse extrinsic rewards. A possible countermeasure is to endow RL agents with an intrinsic reward function, or 'intrinsic motivation', which rewards the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Francesco Massari , Martin Biehl , Lisa Meeden , Ryota Kanai