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In reinforcement learning (RL), rewards of states are typically considered additive, and following the Markov assumption, they are $\textit{independent}$ of states visited previously. In many important applications, such as coverage…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Manish Prajapat , Mojmír Mutný , Melanie N. Zeilinger , Andreas Krause

Decision-making under distribution shift is a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), where training and deployment environments differ. We study this problem through the lens of robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs), which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Jingwen Gu , Yiting He , Zhishuai Liu , Pan Xu

We investigate reinforcement learning (RL) for privileged planning in autonomous driving. State-of-the-art approaches for this task are rule-based, but these methods do not scale to the long tail. RL, on the other hand, is scalable and does…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Bernhard Jaeger , Daniel Dauner , Jens Beißwenger , Simon Gerstenecker , Kashyap Chitta , Andreas Geiger

Reward inference (learning a reward model from human preferences) is a critical intermediate step in the Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) pipeline for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs). In practice, RLHF faces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Qining Zhang , Lei Ying

DPO (Direct Preference Optimization) has become a widely used offline preference optimization algorithm due to its simplicity and training stability. However, DPO is prone to overfitting and collapse. To address these challenges, we propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Rui Wang , Qianguo Sun , Chao Song , Junlong Wu , Tianrong Chen , Zhiyun Zeng , Yu Li

Large language models in the past have typically relied on some form of reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) to better align model responses with human preferences. However, because of oft-observed instabilities when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-15 Xiangkun Hu , Tong He , David Wipf

Policy-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) has established itself as the dominant paradigm in generative recommendation for optimizing sequential user interactions. However, when applied to offline historical logs, these methods suffer a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Jie Jiang , Yusen Huo , Xiangxin Zhan , Changping Wang , Jun Zhang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a promising paradigm for scaling reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the sparsity of binary verifier rewards often leads to low efficiency and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Shuo Yang , Jinda Lu , Kexin Huang , Chiyu Ma , Shaohang Wei , Yuyang Liu , Guoyin Wang , Jingren Zhou , Li Yuan

Large-scale alignment pipelines typically pair a policy model with a separately trained reward model whose parameters remain frozen during reinforcement learning (RL). This separation creates a complex, resource-intensive pipeline and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Songshuo Lu , Hua Wang , Zhi Chen , Yaohua Tang

We propose Process-Aware Policy Optimization (PAPO), a method that integrates process-level evaluation into Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) through decoupled advantage normalization, to address two limitations of existing reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Zelin Tan , Zhouliang Yu , Bohan Lin , Zijie Geng , Hejia Geng , Yudong Zhang , Mulei Zhang , Yang Chen , Shuyue Hu , Zhenfei Yin , Chen Zhang , Lei Bai

Reinforcement Learning (RL) from Human Preference-based feedback is a popular paradigm for fine-tuning generative models, which has produced impressive models such as GPT-4 and Claude3 Opus. This framework often consists of two steps:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Jonathan D. Chang , Wenhao Zhan , Owen Oertell , Kianté Brantley , Dipendra Misra , Jason D. Lee , Wen Sun

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as the leading approach for enhancing reasoning capabilities in large language models. However, it faces a fundamental compute and memory asymmetry: rollout generation is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Yixuan Even Xu , Yash Savani , Fei Fang , J. Zico Kolter

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms often require a large amount of data and struggle in sparse-reward domains with long planning horizons and multiple sub-goals. In this paper, we propose a neuro-symbolic extension of Proximal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Simone Murari , Celeste Veronese , Daniele Meli

Recent advancements in large language model alignment leverage token-level supervisions to perform fine-grained preference optimization. However, existing token-level alignment methods either optimize on all available tokens, which can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Kailai Yang , Zhiwei Liu , Qianqian Xie , Jimin Huang , Erxue Min , Sophia Ananiadou

Optimizing the fuel cycle cost through the optimization of nuclear reactor core loading patterns involves multiple objectives and constraints, leading to a vast number of candidate solutions that cannot be explicitly solved. To advance the…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Paul Seurin , Koroush Shirvan

We study an LLM fine-tuning task for designing reward functions for sequential resource allocation problems in public health, guided by human preferences expressed in natural language. This setting presents a challenging testbed for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Cheol Woo Kim , Shresth Verma , Mauricio Tec , Milind Tambe

Recent theory suggests that reward-model-first methods can be more sample-efficient than direct policy fitting when the reward function is statistically simpler than the induced policy. We propose DDO-RM, a finite-candidate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-01 Tiantian Zhang , Jierui Zuo , Michael Chen , Wenping Wang

Recent advances in constrained reinforcement learning (RL) have endowed reinforcement learning with certain safety guarantees. However, deploying existing constrained RL algorithms in continuous control tasks with general hard constraints…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Shutong Ding , Jingya Wang , Yali Du , Ye Shi

While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has exhibited promise in utilizing external knowledge, its generation process heavily depends on the quality and accuracy of the retrieved context. Large language models (LLMs) struggle to evaluate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Shi-Qi Yan , Quan Liu , Zhen-Hua Ling

Standard on-policy reinforcement learning relies on heuristic clipping to enforce trust regions, but this mechanism imposes a severe cost by indiscriminately truncating high-return yet high-divergence updates. We demonstrate that explicitly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yu Luo , Shuo Han , Yihan Hu , Lei Lv , Huaping Liu , Fuchun Sun , Jianye Hao , Dong Li