English
Related papers

Related papers: Learning from Expert Factors: Trajectory-level Rew…

200 papers

We introduce Self-supervised Online Reward Shaping (SORS), which aims to improve the sample efficiency of any RL algorithm in sparse-reward environments by automatically densifying rewards. The proposed framework alternates between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Farzan Memarian , Wonjoon Goo , Rudolf Lioutikov , Scott Niekum , Ufuk Topcu

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is considered to be a promising approach to reduce the sample complexity that hinders model-free RL. However, the theoretical understanding of such methods has been rather limited. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yuping Luo , Huazhe Xu , Yuanzhi Li , Yuandong Tian , Trevor Darrell , Tengyu Ma

Generating keyphrases that summarize the main points of a document is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Although existing generative models are capable of predicting multiple keyphrases for an input document as well as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Hou Pong Chan , Wang Chen , Lu Wang , Irwin King

Despite the promise of RLHF in aligning LLMs with human preferences, it often leads to superficial alignment, prioritizing stylistic changes over improving downstream performance of LLMs. Underspecified preferences could obscure directions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-22 Kyungjae Lee , Dasol Hwang , Sunghyun Park , Youngsoo Jang , Moontae Lee

Reward Models (RMs) are crucial for online alignment of language models (LMs) with human preferences. However, RM-based preference-tuning is vulnerable to reward hacking, whereby LM policies learn undesirable behaviors from flawed RMs. By…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Daniel Fein , Max Lamparth , Violet Xiang , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Nick Haber

This paper examines the exploration-exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), a framework for improving the reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent studies suggest that RLVR can elicit strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Peter Chen , Xiaopeng Li , Ziniu Li , Wotao Yin , Xi Chen , Tianyi Lin

We study whether self-learning can scale LLM-based agents without relying on human-curated datasets or predefined rule-based rewards. Through controlled experiments in a search-agent setting, we identify two key determinants of scalable…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Wangtao Sun , Xiang Cheng , Jialin Fan , Yao Xu , Xing Yu , Shizhu He , Jun Zhao , Kang Liu

A well-defined reward function is crucial for successful training of an reinforcement learning (RL) agent. However, defining a suitable reward function is a notoriously challenging task, especially in complex, multi-objective environments.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Jasmina Gajcin , James McCarthy , Rahul Nair , Radu Marinescu , Elizabeth Daly , Ivana Dusparic

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as an efficient method of choice for solving complex sequential decision making problems in automatic control, computer science, economics, and biology. In this paper we present a model-free RL…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2019-09-13 Mohammadhosein Hasanbeig , Yiannis Kantaros , Alessandro Abate , Daniel Kroening , George J. Pappas , Insup Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective paradigm for enhancing model reasoning. However, existing RL methods like GRPO typically rely on unstructured self-sampling to fit scalar rewards, often producing inefficient rollouts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Jinyang Wu , Chonghua Liao , Mingkuan Feng , Shuai Zhang , Zhengqi Wen , Haoran Luo , Ling Yang , Huazhe Xu , Jianhua Tao

Many continuous control problems can be formulated as sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. In principle, online RL methods can automatically explore the state space to solve each new task. However, discovering sequences of…

Aligning human preference and value is an important requirement for contemporary foundation models. State-of-the-art techniques such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) often consist of two stages: 1) supervised fine-tuning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Jiaxiang Li , Siliang Zeng , Hoi-To Wai , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

We consider the problem of learning from sparse and underspecified rewards, where an agent receives a complex input, such as a natural language instruction, and needs to generate a complex response, such as an action sequence, while only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Rishabh Agarwal , Chen Liang , Dale Schuurmans , Mohammad Norouzi

We propose FlowRL: matching the full reward distribution via flow balancing instead of maximizing rewards in large language model (LLM) reinforcement learning (RL). Recent advanced reasoning models adopt reward-maximizing methods (\eg, PPO…

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

Learning from Demonstrations (LfD) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) have enabled robot agents to accomplish complex tasks. Reward Machines (RMs) enhance RL's capability to train policies over extended time horizons by structuring high-level…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Mattijs Baert , Sam Leroux , Pieter Simoens

Learning to produce efficient movement behaviour for humanoid robots from scratch is a hard problem, as has been illustrated by the "Learning to run" competition at NIPS 2017. The goal of this competition was to train a two-legged model of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-17 Aleksandra Malysheva , Daniel Kudenko , Aleksei Shpilman

Single-task RL agents are typically trained under a fixed reward function, which limits their robustness to reward misspecification and their ability to adapt to changing preferences. We introduce Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan , Pieter Abbeel

Decomposing complex tasks into a sequence of simpler subtasks can improve learning efficiency for an autonomous agent. Reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to optimize agent policies to complete subtasks, but requires well-defined…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Nicholas Potteiger , Ankita Samaddar , Taylor T. Johnson , Xenofon Koutsoukos

Speech large language models (LLMs) have driven significant progress in end-to-end speech understanding and recognition, yet they continue to struggle with accurately recognizing rare words and domain-specific terminology. This paper…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-21 Bo Ren , Ruchao Fan , Yelong Shen , Weizhu Chen , Jinyu Li