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Reward machines are automaton-like structures that capture the memory required to accomplish a multi-stage task. When combined with reinforcement learning or optimal control methods, they can be used to synthesize robot policies to achieve…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Mohamad Louai Shehab , Antoine Aspeel , Necmiye Ozay

Reinforcement Learning (RL) in environments with complex, history-dependent reward structures poses significant challenges for traditional methods. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that leverages automaton-based feedback to guide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Mahyar Alinejad , Alvaro Velasquez , Yue Wang , George Atia

Reinforcement learning (RL) is central to improving reasoning in large language models (LLMs) but typically requires ground-truth rewards. Test-Time Reinforcement Learning (TTRL) removes this need by using majority-vote rewards, but relies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Aleksei Arzhantsev , Otmane Sakhi , Flavian Vasile

Energy efficiency in mobile networks is crucial for sustainable telecommunications infrastructure, particularly as network densification continues to increase power consumption. Sleep mechanisms for the components in mobile networks can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Kristina Levina , Nikolaos Pappas , Athanasios Karapantelakis , Aneta Vulgarakis Feljan , Jendrik Seipp

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning algorithms have successfully been applied to temporal credit assignment problems with sparse reward signals. However, state-of-the-art algorithms require manual specification of sub-task structures, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-24 Robert Tjarko Lange , Aldo Faisal

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, a collection of agents learns to interact in a shared environment to achieve a common goal. We propose the use of reward machines (RM) -- Mealy machines used as structured representations…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Cyrus Neary , Zhe Xu , Bo Wu , Ufuk Topcu

Episodic tasks in Reinforcement Learning (RL) often pose challenges due to sparse reward signals and high-dimensional state spaces, which hinder efficient learning. Additionally, these tasks often feature hidden "trap states" --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Yuxuan Li , Yicheng Gao , Ning Yang , Stephen Xia

This paper presents a reinforcement learning framework that incorporates a Contextual Reward Machine for task-oriented grasping. The Contextual Reward Machine reduces task complexity by decomposing grasping tasks into manageable sub-tasks.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Hui Li , Akhlak Uz Zaman , Fujian Yan , Hongsheng He

Multi-task representation learning (MTRL) is an approach that learns shared latent representations across related tasks, facilitating collaborative learning that improves the overall learning efficiency. This paper studies MTRL for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yaoze Guo , Shana Moothedath

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has made significant strides in enabling artificial agents to learn diverse behaviors. However, learning an effective policy often requires a large number of environment interactions. To mitigate sample…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Yash Shukla , Tanushree Burman , Abhishek Kulkarni , Robert Wright , Alvaro Velasquez , Jivko Sinapov

Temporal difference (TD) methods constitute a class of methods for learning predictions in multi-step prediction problems, parameterized by a recency factor lambda. Currently the most important application of these methods is to temporal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2008-02-03 P. Cichosz

Designing rewards for Reinforcement Learning (RL) is challenging because it needs to convey the desired task, be efficient to optimize, and be easy to compute. The latter is particularly problematic when applying RL to robotics, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-28 Yiming Ding , Carlos Florensa , Mariano Phielipp , Pieter Abbeel

Traditionally, reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn to solve new tasks by updating their neural network parameters through interactions with the task environment. However, recent works demonstrate that some RL agents, after certain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Jiuqi Wang , Ethan Blaser , Hadi Daneshmand , Shangtong Zhang

Can humans get arbitrarily capable reinforcement learning (RL) agents to do their bidding? Or will sufficiently capable RL agents always find ways to bypass their intended objectives by shortcutting their reward signal? This question…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-03-29 Tom Everitt , Marcus Hutter , Ramana Kumar , Victoria Krakovna

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is essential for evolving Large Language Models (LLMs) into autonomous agents capable of long-horizon planning, yet a practical recipe for scaling RL in complex, multi-turn environments remains elusive. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Xixi Wu , Qianguo Sun , Ruiyang Zhang , Chao Song , Junlong Wu , Yiyan Qi , Hong Cheng

Our understanding of reinforcement learning (RL) has been shaped by theoretical and empirical results that were obtained decades ago using tabular representations and linear function approximators. These results suggest that RL methods that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-05 Artemij Amiranashvili , Alexey Dosovitskiy , Vladlen Koltun , Thomas Brox

Reward models (RMs) play a critical role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Yet in the domain of tool learning, the lack of RMs specifically designed for function-calling tasks has limited progress toward more…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Renhao Li , Jianhong Tu , Yang Su , Yantao Liu , Fei Huang , Hamid Alinejad-Rokny , Derek F. Wong , Junyang Lin , Min Yang

In this paper, we propose a model-free reinforcement learning method to synthesize control policies for motion planning problems with continuous states and actions. The robot is modelled as a labeled discrete-time Markov decision process…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Chuanzheng Wang , Yinan Li , Stephen L. Smith , Jun Liu

The potential of reinforcement learning (RL) to deliver aligned and performant agents is partially bottlenecked by the reward engineering problem. One alternative to heuristic trial-and-error is preference-based RL (PbRL), where a reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Tom Bewley , Freddy Lecue

Designing dense rewards is crucial for reinforcement learning (RL), yet in robotics it often demands extensive manual effort and lacks scalability. One promising solution is to view task progress as a dense reward signal, as it quantifies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Yuyang Liu , Chuan Wen , Yihang Hu , Dinesh Jayaraman , Yang Gao