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Frontier models have demonstrated exceptional capabilities following the integration of task-reward-based reinforcement learning (RL) into their training pipelines, enabling systems to evolve from pure reasoning models into sophisticated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Sarthak Mittal , Leo Gagnon , Guillaume Lajoie

Reinforcement learning agents are fundamentally limited by the quality of the reward functions they learn from, yet reward design is often overlooked under the assumption that a well-defined reward is readily available. However, in…

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models exhibit strong generalization in robotic manipulation, yet reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning often degrades robustness under spatial distribution shifts. For flow-matching VLA policies, this…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Xu Pan , Zhenglin Wan , Xingrui Yu , Xianwei Zheng , Youkai Ke , Ming Sun , Rui Wang , Ziwei Wang , Ivor Tsang

Despite the numerous advances, reinforcement learning remains away from widespread acceptance for autonomous controller design as compared to classical methods due to lack of ability to effectively tackle the reality gap. The reliance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Narendra Patwardhan , Zequn Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems typically optimize scalar reward functions that assume precise and reliable evaluation of outcomes. However, real-world objectives--especially those derived from human preferences--are often uncertain,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Disha Singha

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently improved mathematical reasoning through Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR). However, existing RLVR algorithms require large query budgets, making annotation costly. We investigate…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Hao Yi , Yulan Hu , Xin Li , Sheng Ouyang , Lizhong Ding , Yong Liu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the careful design of the reward function. However, accurately assigning rewards to each state-action pair in Long-Term Reinforcement Learning (LTRL) tasks remains a significant challenge. As a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Qi Ju , Falin Hei , Zhemei Fang , Yunfeng Luo

Reward models (RMs) play a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values. However, noisy preferences in human feedback can lead to reward misgeneralization - a phenomenon where reward models learn spurious…

Learning from rewards (i.e., reinforcement learning or RL) and learning to imitate a teacher (i.e., teacher-student learning) are two established approaches for solving sequential decision-making problems. To combine the benefits of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Idan Shenfeld , Zhang-Wei Hong , Aviv Tamar , Pulkit Agrawal

Proactive Recommender Systems (PRSs) aim to guide user preference shift toward target items by generating paths of intermediate recommendations. Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a principled framework for optimizing such sequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Hongru Hou , Tiehua Mei , Denghui Geng , Jinhui Huang , Ao Xu , Hengrui Chen , Jiaqing Liang , Deqing Yang

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) can help avoid sophisticated reward designs and align better with human intentions, showing great promise in various real-world applications. However, obtaining human feedback for preferences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Yiqin Yang , Hao Hu , Yihuan Mao , Jin Zhang , Chengjie Wu , Yuhua Jiang , Xu Yang , Runpeng Xie , Yi Fan , Bo Liu , Yang Gao , Bo Xu , Chongjie Zhang

The pursuit of energy-efficient and adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) has positioned neuromorphic computing as a promising alternative to conventional computing. However, achieving learning on these platforms requires techniques that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Jesús García Fernández , Nasir Ahmad , Marcel van Gerven

The aim of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world applications is to create systems capable of making autonomous decisions by learning from their environment through trial and error. This paper emphasizes the importance of reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Sinan Ibrahim , Mostafa Mostafa , Ali Jnadi , Hadi Salloum , Pavel Osinenko

Building a search relevance model that achieves both low latency and high performance is a long-standing challenge in the search industry. To satisfy the millisecond-level response requirements of online systems while retaining the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Shijie Zhang , Xiang Guo , Rujun Guo , Shaoyu Liu , Xiaozhao Wang , Guanjun Jiang , Kevin Zhang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a prevalent and effective methodology for real-world recommender systems, enabling learning policies from historical data and capturing user preferences. In offline RL, reward shaping…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Wenzheng Shu , Yanxiang Zeng , Yongxiang Tang , Teng Sha , Ning Luo , Yanhua Cheng , Xialong Liu , Fan Zhou , Peng Jiang

Preference-based reward learning is a popular technique for teaching robots and autonomous systems how a human user wants them to perform a task. Previous works have shown that actively synthesizing preference queries to maximize…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Evan Ellis , Gaurav R. Ghosal , Stuart J. Russell , Anca Dragan , Erdem Bıyık

Many value-based deep reinforcement learning algorithms rely on target networks - lagged copies of the online network - to stabilize training. While effective, this mechanism introduces a fundamental stability-recency tradeoff: slower…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Leonard S. Pleiss , James Harrison , Maximilian Schiffer

While Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) systems have achieved high accuracy in identifying sentiment polarities, they often operate as "black boxes," lacking the explicit reasoning capabilities characteristic of human affective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Shihao Zhang , Ziwei Wang , Jie Zhou , Yulan Wu , Qin Chen , Zhikai Lei , Liyang Yu , Liang Dou , Liang He

Reinforcement learning (RL) solves sequential decision-making problems via a trial-and-error process interacting with the environment. While RL achieves outstanding success in playing complex video games that allow huge trial-and-error,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Fan-Ming Luo , Tian Xu , Hang Lai , Xiong-Hui Chen , Weinan Zhang , Yang Yu

Reward shaping (RS) is a powerful method in reinforcement learning (RL) for overcoming the problem of sparse or uninformative rewards. However, RS typically relies on manually engineered shaping-reward functions whose construction is…