Related papers: Pushdown Reward Machines for Reinforcement Learnin…

Reinforcement learning (RL) requires either manually specifying a reward function, which is often infeasible, or learning a reward model from a large amount of human feedback, which is often very expensive. We study a more sample-efficient…

Mastering robotic manipulation skills through reinforcement learning (RL) typically requires the design of shaped reward functions. Recent developments in this area have demonstrated that using sparse rewards, i.e. rewarding the agent only…

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) is a paradigm in which an RL agent learns to optimize a task using pair-wise preference-based feedback over trajectories, rather than explicit reward signals. While PbRL has demonstrated…

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…

We present LARL-RM (Large language model-generated Automaton for Reinforcement Learning with Reward Machine) algorithm in order to encode high-level knowledge into reinforcement learning using automaton to expedite the reinforcement…

Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) replaces reward values in traditional reinforcement learning by preferences to better elicit human opinion on the target objective, especially when numerical reward values are hard to design or…

Many Reinforcement Learning algorithms assume a Markov reward function to guarantee optimality. However, not all reward functions are Markov. This paper proposes a framework for mapping non-Markov reward functions into equivalent Markov…

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) can enable robots to learn to perform tasks based on an individual's preferences without requiring a hand-crafted reward function. However, existing approaches either assume access to a…

Learned representations in deep reinforcement learning (DRL) have to extract task-relevant information from complex observations, balancing between robustness to distraction and informativeness to the policy. Such stable and rich…

Recursion is the fundamental paradigm to finitely describe potentially infinite objects. As state-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms cannot directly reason about recursion, they must rely on the practitioner's ingenuity in…

In this work we augment a Deep Q-Learning agent with a Reward Machine (DQRM) to increase speed of learning vision-based policies for robot tasks, and overcome some of the limitations of DQN that prevent it from converging to good-quality…

Improving the multi-step reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a critical yet challenging task. The dominant paradigm, outcome-supervised reinforcement learning (RLVR), rewards only correct final answers, often propagating…

Process reward models (PRMs) provide more nuanced supervision compared to outcome reward models (ORMs) for optimizing policy models, positioning them as a promising approach to enhancing the capabilities of LLMs in complex reasoning tasks.…

The primary obstacle for applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world robotics is the design of effective reward functions. While recently learning-based Process Reward Models (PRMs) are a promising direction, they are often hindered…

In this paper, we study reinforcement learning in Markov Decision Processes with Probabilistic Reward Machines (PRMs), a form of non-Markovian reward commonly found in robotics tasks. We design an algorithm for PRMs that achieves a regret…

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited extraordinary performance in a variety of tasks while it remains challenging for them to solve complex multi-step tasks as agents. In practice, agents sensitive to the outcome of certain key steps…

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is commonly used in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback to align large language models (LLMs) with downstream tasks. This paper investigates the feasibility of using PPO for direct reinforcement…

Reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in sparse reward settings, often requires prohibitively large numbers of interactions with the environment, thereby limiting its applicability to complex problems. To address this, several prior…

Researchers have demonstrated that Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a powerful tool for finding policies that perform well on complex robotic systems. However, these policies are often unpredictable and can induce highly variable…