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Reinforcement Learning (RL) in various decision-making tasks of machine learning provides effective results with an agent learning from a stand-alone reward function. However, it presents unique challenges with large amounts of environment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-10 Neda Navidi

In the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, the learning is guided through a reward signal. This means that in situations of sparse rewards the agent has to focus on exploration, in order to discover which action, or set of actions leads…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-03 Giuseppe Paolo

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) under sparse rewards remains fundamentally challenging because agents often fail to concentrate their influence, leading to insufficiently coordinated exploration. To address this, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yisak Park , Sunwoo Lee , Seungyul Han

Automatically synthesizing dense rewards from natural language descriptions is a promising paradigm in reinforcement learning (RL), with applications to sparse reward problems, open-ended exploration, and hierarchical skill design. Recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Qinqing Zheng , Mikael Henaff , Amy Zhang , Aditya Grover , Brandon Amos

Sparse rewards are a major bottleneck in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where simultaneous learning induces non-stationarity and makes reward design especially delicate. Reward shaping can accelerate learning, but in the…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Elie Abboud , Oren Gal

While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly used to generate reward signals for training embodied agents to follow instructions, our research reveals that agents guided by VLM rewards often underperform compared to those employing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Sukai Huang , Shu-Wei Liu , Nir Lipovetzky , Trevor Cohn

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in fields like robotics and autonomous driving, but adversarial attacks designed to mislead RL systems remain challenging. Existing approaches often rely on modifying the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Junyong Jiang , Buwei Tian , Chenxing Xu , Songze Li , Lu Dong

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been proven its efficiency in capturing users' dynamic interests in recent literature. However, training a DRL agent is challenging, because of the sparse environment in recommender systems (RS), DRL…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Xiaocong Chen , Siyu Wang , Lina Yao , Lianyong Qi , Yong Li

Designing a distribution of environments in which RL agents can learn interesting and useful skills is a challenging and poorly understood task, for multi-agent environments the difficulties are only exacerbated. One approach is to train a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-07 Ingmar Kanitscheider , Harri Edwards

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently emerged as a promising framework for improving reasoning abilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, policy optimized with binary verification prone to overlook…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Jinghao Zhang , Naishan Zheng , Ruilin Li , Dongzhou Cheng , Zheming Liang , Feng Zhao , Jiaqi Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated strong potential in training large language models (LLMs) capable of complex reasoning for real-world problem solving. More recently, RL has been leveraged to create sophisticated LLM-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Bowen Jin , Jinsung Yoon , Priyanka Kargupta , Sercan O. Arik , Jiawei Han

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically struggle in the absence of a dense, well-shaped reward function. Intrinsically motivated exploration methods address this limitation by rewarding agents for visiting novel states or transitions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-18 Yuqing Du , Olivia Watkins , Zihan Wang , Cédric Colas , Trevor Darrell , Pieter Abbeel , Abhishek Gupta , Jacob Andreas

Innate values describe agents' intrinsic motivations, which reflect their inherent interests and preferences for pursuing goals and drive them to develop diverse skills that satisfy their various needs. Traditional reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Qin Yang

Large language model (LLM) agents learn by interacting with environments, but long-horizon training remains fundamentally bottlenecked by sparse and delayed rewards. Existing methods typically address this challenge through post-hoc credit…

Successfully navigating a complex environment to obtain a desired outcome is a difficult task, that up to recently was believed to be capable only by humans. This perception has been broken down over time, especially with the introduction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Joshua Hare

Reward models (RMs) are a core component in the post-training of large language models (LLMs), serving as proxies for human preference evaluation and guiding model alignment. However, training reliable RMs under limited resources remains…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Dengcan Liu , Jiahao Li , Zheren Fu , Yi Tu , Jiajun Li , Zhendong Mao , Yongdong Zhang

Conventional state representations in reinforcement learning often omit critical task-related details, presenting a significant challenge for value networks in establishing accurate mappings from states to task rewards. Traditional methods…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-19 Boyuan Wang , Yun Qu , Yuhang Jiang , Jianzhun Shao , Chang Liu , Wenming Yang , Xiangyang Ji

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has traditionally focused on training specialized agents to optimize predefined reward functions within narrowly defined environments. However, the advent of powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) and increasingly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Fangming Cui , Ruixiao Zhu , Cheng Fang , Sunan Li , Jiahong Li

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

We propose RLAnything, a reinforcement learning framework that dynamically forges environment, policy, and reward models through closed-loop optimization, amplifying learning signals and strengthening the overall RL system for any LLM or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Yinjie Wang , Tianbao Xie , Ke Shen , Mengdi Wang , Ling Yang