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Human-designed reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL) agents are frequently misaligned with the humans' true, unobservable objectives, and thus act only as proxies. Optimizing for a misspecified proxy reward function often induces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Stephane Hatgis-Kessell , Logan Mondal Bhamidipaty , Emma Brunskill

The main challenge in developing effective reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines is often the design and tuning the reward functions. Well-designed shaping reward can lead to significantly faster learning. Naively formulated rewards,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-20 Se Hwan Jeon , Steve Heim , Charles Khazoom , Sangbae Kim

The utility of reinforcement learning is limited by the alignment of reward functions with the interests of human stakeholders. One promising method for alignment is to learn the reward function from human-generated preferences between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-08 W. Bradley Knox , Stephane Hatgis-Kessell , Serena Booth , Scott Niekum , Peter Stone , Alessandro Allievi

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

Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Cevahir Koprulu , Ufuk Topcu

Reward shaping is one of the most effective methods to tackle the crucial yet challenging problem of credit assignment in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, designing shaping functions usually requires much expert knowledge and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-29 Haosheng Zou , Tongzheng Ren , Dong Yan , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

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

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) assumes that an agent can observe a reward for each state-action pair. However, in practical applications, it is often difficult and costly to collect a reward for each state-action pair. While there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Yihan Du , Anna Winnicki , Gal Dalal , Shie Mannor , R. Srikant

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents can often be difficult, involving meticulous design of reward functions that are sufficiently informative yet easy enough to provide. Human-in-the-loop RL methods allow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Kimin Lee , Laura Smith , Pieter Abbeel

While reinforcement learning (RL) has been successful in natural language processing (NLP) domains such as dialogue generation and text-based games, it typically faces the problem of sparse rewards that leads to slow or no convergence.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Ameet Deshpande , Eve Fleisig

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 (RL) has shown to be a valuable tool in training neural networks for autonomous motion planning. The application of RL to a specific problem is dependent on a reward signal to quantify how good or bad a certain action…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Benjamin Evans , Herman A. Engelbrecht , Hendrik W. Jordaan

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable reward (RLVR) on preference data has become the mainstream approach for training Generative Reward Models (GRMs). Typically in pairwise rewarding tasks, GRMs generate reasoning chains ending with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Zongqi Wang , Rui Wang , Yuchuan Wu , Yiyao Yu , Pinyi Zhang , Shaoning Sun , Yujiu Yang , Yongbin Li

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves multimodal reasoning by rewarding verifiable final answers. Yet answer-correct trajectories may still rely on incomplete derivations, weak evidence, or statements that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Mengzhao Jia , Zhihan Zhang , Meng Jiang

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), designing precise reward functions remains to be a challenge, particularly when aligning with human intent. Preference-based RL (PbRL) was introduced to address this problem by learning reward models from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Heewoong Choi , Sangwon Jung , Hongjoon Ahn , Taesup Moon

Personalizing large language models (LLMs) to accommodate diverse user preferences is essential for enhancing alignment and user satisfaction. Traditional reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) approaches often rely on monolithic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Avinandan Bose , Zhihan Xiong , Yuejie Chi , Simon Shaolei Du , Lin Xiao , Maryam Fazel

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) has proven to be a successful framework for leveraging experience from prior tasks to rapidly learn new related tasks, however, current meta-RL approaches struggle to learn in sparse reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-12-03 Charles Packer , Pieter Abbeel , Joseph E. Gonzalez

Reward modeling (RM), which captures human preferences to align large language models (LLMs), is increasingly employed in tasks such as model finetuning, response filtering, and ranking. However, due to the inherent complexity of human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Pankayaraj Pathmanathan , Furong Huang

Deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) has been successful in learning sophisticated behaviors automatically; however, the learning process requires a huge number of trials. In contrast, animals can learn new tasks in just a few trials,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-11-11 Yan Duan , John Schulman , Xi Chen , Peter L. Bartlett , Ilya Sutskever , Pieter Abbeel

Reinforcement learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) learns from preference signals, while standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) directly learns from reward signals. Preferences arguably contain less information than rewards, which makes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Yuanhao Wang , Qinghua Liu , Chi Jin