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Applying reinforcement learning (RL) to sparse reward domains is notoriously challenging due to insufficient guiding signals. Common RL techniques for addressing such domains include (1) learning from demonstrations and (2) curriculum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-29 Vaibhav Bajaj , Guni Sharon , Peter Stone

Automating real-world software engineering tasks remains challenging for large language model (LLM)-based agents due to the need for long-horizon reasoning over large, evolving codebases and making consistent decisions across interdependent…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Mahir Labib Dihan , Md Ashrafur Rahman Khan

Controlled text generation tasks such as unsupervised text style transfer have increasingly adopted the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL). A major challenge in applying RL to such tasks is the sparse reward, which is available only after…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-19 Bhargav Upadhyay , Akhilesh Sudhakar , Arjun Maheswaran

Delayed and sparse rewards present a fundamental obstacle for reinforcement-learning (RL) agents, which struggle to assign credit for actions whose benefits emerge many steps later. The sliding-tile game 2048 epitomizes this challenge:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Prady Saligram , Tanvir Bhathal , Robby Manihani

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in real-world decision-making across diverse domains, including gaming, robotics, online advertising, public health, and natural language processing. Despite these advances, a…

Applications · Statistics 2026-01-23 Asim H. Gazi , Yongyi Guo , Daiqi Gao , Ziping Xu , Kelly W. Zhang , Susan A. Murphy

Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with external tools via multi-agent systems offers a promising new paradigm for decomposing and solving complex problems. However, training these systems remains notoriously difficult due to the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yanming Li , Xuelin Zhang , WenJie Lu , Ziye Tang , Maodong Wu , Haotian Luo , Tongtong Wu , Zijie Peng , Hongze Mi , Yibo Feng , Naiqiang Tan , Chao Huang , Hong Chen , Li Shen

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

Process reward models (PRMs) that provide dense, step-level feedback have shown promise for reinforcement learning, yet their adoption remains limited by the need for expensive step-level annotations or ground truth references. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Salman Rahman , Sruthi Gorantla , Arpit Gupta , Swastik Roy , Nanyun Peng , Yang Liu

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown strong results on multi-turn tool-use tasks, yet they operate in isolation during training, failing to leverage experiences accumulated across episodes. Existing experience-augmented methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Prince Zizhuang Wang , Shuli Jiang

We introduce Reward-Zero, a general-purpose implicit reward mechanism that transforms natural-language task descriptions into dense, semantically grounded progress signals for reinforcement learning (RL). Reward-Zero serves as a simple yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Heng Zhang , Haddy Alchaer , Arash Ajoudani , Yu She

Reinforcement learning (RL) is the dominant paradigm for sharpening strategic tool use capabilities of LLMs on long-horizon, sparsely-rewarded agent tasks, yet it faces a fundamental challenge of exploration-exploitation trade-off. Existing…

As large language model (LLM) agents evolve from isolated tool users into coordinated teams, reinforcement learning (RL) must optimize not only individual actions but also how work is spawned, delegated, communicated, aggregated, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Chenchen Zhang

Reinforcement learning involves agents interacting with an environment to complete tasks. When rewards provided by the environment are sparse, agents may not receive immediate feedback on the quality of actions that they take, thereby…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Baicen Xiao , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Radha Poovendran

Reinforcement Learning (RL) bears the promise of being a game-changer in many applications. However, since most of the literature in the field is currently focused on opaque models, the use of RL in high-stakes scenarios, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Leonardo Lucio Custode , Giovanni Iacca

Reinforcement Learning (RL) enables an intelligent agent to optimise its performance in a task by continuously taking action from an observed state and receiving a feedback from the environment in form of rewards. RL typically uses tables…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Alberto Castagna

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a sub-domain of machine learning, mainly concerned with solving sequential decision-making problems by a learning agent that interacts with the decision environment to improve its behavior through the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Hossein Hassani , Ehsan Hallaji , Roozbeh Razavi-Far , Mehrdad Saif , Liang Lin

Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is an approach wherein the experience gained from solving a variety of tasks is distilled into a meta-policy. The meta-policy, when adapted over only a small (or just a single) number of steps, is able…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-28 Desik Rengarajan , Sapana Chaudhary , Jaewon Kim , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai

A promising approach for improving reasoning in large language models is to use process reward models (PRMs). PRMs provide feedback at each step of a multi-step reasoning trace, potentially improving credit assignment over outcome reward…

Large Language Models (LLMs) empowered with Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) can iteratively plan, call external tools, and integrate returned information to solve complex, long-horizon reasoning tasks. Agentic Reinforcement Learning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Jianghao Su , Xia Zeng , Luhui Liu , Chao Luo , Ye Chen , Zhuoran Zhuang