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In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Grigorii Veviurko , Wendelin Böhmer , Mathijs de Weerdt

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Meng Cao , Lei Shu , Lei Yu , Yun Zhu , Nevan Wichers , Yinxiao Liu , Lei Meng

Reinforcement learning post-training has substantially improved the reasoning accuracy of vision-language models, yet the resulting policies remain poorly calibrated. Terminal correctness rewards provide no gradient that penalizes confident…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Peng Cui , Boyao Yang , Jun Zhu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the careful design of the reward function. However, accurately assigning rewards to each state-action pair in Long-Term Reinforcement Learning (LTRL) tasks remains a significant challenge. As a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Qi Ju , Falin Hei , Zhemei Fang , Yunfeng Luo

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) suffers from exploration inefficiency, where models struggle to generate successful rollouts, resulting in minimal learning signal. This challenge is particularly severe for tasks that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Saaket Agashe , Jayanth Srinivasa , Gaowen Liu , Ramana Kompella , Xin Eric Wang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has improved the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by using rule-based binary feedback. However, current RLVR methods typically assign the same reward to every token.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Guofu Xie , Yunsheng Shi , Hongtao Tian , Ting Yao , Xiao Zhang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms can solve challenging control problems directly from image observations, but they often require millions of environment interactions to do so. Recently, model-based RL algorithms have greatly improved…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Yifan Xu , Nicklas Hansen , Zirui Wang , Yung-Chieh Chan , Hao Su , Zhuowen Tu

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that users specify tasks by manually writing down a reward function. However, this process can be laborious and demands considerable technical expertise. Can we devise RL algorithms that instead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Alexander G. Padula , Dennis J. N. J. Soemers

Reinforcement Learning (RL) empowers agents to acquire various skills by learning from reward signals. Unfortunately, designing high-quality instance-level rewards often demands significant effort. An emerging alternative, RL with delayed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Yuting Tang , Xin-Qiang Cai , Jing-Cheng Pang , Qiyu Wu , Yao-Xiang Ding , Masashi Sugiyama

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard paradigm for refining large language models (LLMs) beyond pre-training and instruction tuning. A prominent line of work is RL with verifiable rewards (RLVR), which leverages automatically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Bonan Zhang , Zhongqi Chen , Bowen Song , Qinya Li , Fan Wu , Guihai Chen

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for neural combinatorial optimization, enabling models to learn heuristics that solve complex problems without requiring expert knowledge. Despite significant progress, existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Mingjun Pan , Guanquan Lin , You-Wei Luo , Bin Zhu , Zhien Dai , Lijun Sun , Chun Yuan

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

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved the reasoning ability of LLMs, but often depends on external supervision from human annotations or gold-standard solutions. Reinforcement learning from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Shourov Joarder , Diganta Sikdar , Ahsan Habib Akash , Binod Bhattarai , Prashnna Gyawali

Reinforcement learning (RL) has increasingly been applied to solve real-world planning problems, with progress in handling large state spaces and time horizons. However, a key bottleneck in many domains is that RL methods cannot accommodate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Lily Xu , Bryan Wilder , Elias B. Khalil , Milind Tambe

Online reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse rewards poses a challenge partly because of the lack of feedback on states leading to the goal. Furthermore, expert offline data with reward signal is rarely available to provide this feedback…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Nitish Dashora , Dibya Ghosh , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful approach to enhance task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. However, existing RL methods tend to mainly focus on generation tasks, such as dialogue policy learning (DPL) or response generation (RG),…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Huifang Du , Shuqin Li , Minghao Wu , Xuejing Feng , Yuan-Fang Li , Haofen Wang

This paper studies tabular reinforcement learning (RL) in the hybrid setting, which assumes access to both an offline dataset and online interactions with the unknown environment. A central question boils down to how to efficiently utilize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Gen Li , Wenhao Zhan , Jason D. Lee , Yuejie Chi , Yuxin Chen

Adversarial self-play in two-player games has delivered impressive results when used with reinforcement learning algorithms that combine deep neural networks and tree search. Algorithms like AlphaZero and Expert Iteration learn tabula-rasa,…