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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

The commonly used Reinforcement Learning (RL) model, MDPs (Markov Decision Processes), has a basic premise that rewards depend on the current state and action only. However, many real-world tasks are non-Markovian, which has long-term…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Ruixuan Miao , Xu Lu , Cong Tian , Bin Yu , Zhenhua Duan

Many real-world robot learning problems, such as pick-and-place or arriving at a destination, can be seen as a problem of reaching a goal state as soon as possible. These problems, when formulated as episodic reinforcement learning tasks,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-10 Gautham Vasan , Yan Wang , Fahim Shahriar , James Bergstra , Martin Jagersand , A. Rupam Mahmood

Deep Research agents tackle knowledge-intensive tasks through multi-round retrieval and decision-oriented generation. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been shown to improve performance in this paradigm, its contributions remain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yinuo Xu , Shuo Lu , Jianjie Cheng , Meng Wang , Qianlong Xie , Xingxing Wang , Ran He , Jian Liang

Episodic rewards present a significant challenge in reinforcement learning. While intrinsic reward methods have demonstrated effectiveness in single-agent rein-forcement learning scenarios, their application to multi-agent reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Kesheng Chen , Wenjian Luo , Bang Zhang , Zeping Yin , Zipeng Ye

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely deployed across numerous fields. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) leverages reward models (RMs) as proxies for human preferences to align LLM behaviors with human values, making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Shuyi Zhang , Wei Shi , Sihang Li , Jiayi Liao , Hengxing Cai , Xiang Wang

In constrained reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to not only optimize the overall reward but also satisfy the additional safety, diversity, or budget constraints. Consequently, existing constrained RL solutions require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Chi Jin

Static feature exclusion strategies often fail to prevent bias when hidden dependencies influence the model predictions. To address this issue, we explore a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that integrates bias mitigation and automated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sudip Khadka , L. S. Paudel

For task-oriented dialog systems, training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based Dialog Management module suffers from low sample efficiency and slow convergence speed due to the sparse rewards in RL.To solve this problem, many strategies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Zhengxu Hou , Bang Liu , Ruihui Zhao , Zijing Ou , Yafei Liu , Xi Chen , Yefeng Zheng

In graph-structured multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) adversarial tasks such as pursuit and confrontation, agents must coordinate under highly dynamic interactions, where sparse rewards hinder efficient policy learning. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Ruochuan Shi , Runyu Lu , Yuanheng Zhu , Dongbin Zhao

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

The reward signal plays a central role in defining the desired behaviors of agents in reinforcement learning (RL). Rewards collected from realistic environments could be perturbed, corrupted, or noisy due to an adversary, sensor error, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Xi Chen , Zhihui Zhu , Andrew Perrault

Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) aims to learn a policy solving a set of training tasks simultaneously and quickly adapting to new tasks. It requires massive amounts of data drawn from training tasks to infer the common structure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-21 Yijie Guo , Qiucheng Wu , Honglak Lee

A Markov decision process can be parameterized by a transition kernel and a reward function. Both play essential roles in the study of reinforcement learning as evidenced by their presence in the Bellman equations. In our inquiry of various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-04 Falcon Z. Dai

Multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) is commonly considered to suffer from non-stationary environments and exponentially increasing policy space. It would be even more challenging when rewards are sparse and delayed over long…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a critical technique for enhancing LLM-based deep search agents. However, existing approaches primarily rely on binary outcome rewards, which fail to capture the comprehensiveness and factuality of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Jiajie Zhang , Xin Lv , Ling Feng , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

In order to solve a task using reinforcement learning, it is necessary to first formalise the goal of that task as a reward function. However, for many real-world tasks, it is very difficult to manually specify a reward function that never…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-13 Joar Skalse , Lucy Farnik , Sumeet Ramesh Motwani , Erik Jenner , Adam Gleave , Alessandro Abate

Imitation learning is an effective alternative approach to learn a policy when the reward function is sparse. In this paper, we consider a challenging setting where an agent and an expert use different actions from each other. We assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Konrad Zolna , Negar Rostamzadeh , Yoshua Bengio , Sungjin Ahn , Pedro O. Pinheiro

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) requires agents to discover joint strategies in a combinatorially large state-action space, yet effective coordination configurations are exceedingly rare. Intrinsic motivation, which…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Dahyun Oh , Minhyuk Yoon , H. Jin Kim

Reward machines (RMs) are automata structures that encode (non-Markovian) reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL). RMs can reward any behaviour representable in regular languages and, when paired with RL algorithms that exploit RM…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Giovanni Varricchione , Toryn Q. Klassen , Natasha Alechina , Mehdi Dastani , Brian Logan , Sheila A. McIlraith