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The integration of Reinforcement Learning (RL) with heuristic methods is an emerging trend for solving optimization problems, which leverages RL's ability to learn from the data generated during the search process. One promising approach is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Arthur Müller , Lukas Vollenkemper

Reinforcement learning optimizes policies for expected cumulative reward. Need the supervision be so narrow? Reward is delayed and sparse for many tasks, making it a difficult and impoverished signal for end-to-end optimization. To augment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-10 Evan Shelhamer , Parsa Mahmoudieh , Max Argus , Trevor Darrell

Providing a suitable reward function to reinforcement learning can be difficult in many real world applications. While inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) holds promise for automatically learning reward functions from demonstrations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Lantao Yu , Tianhe Yu , Chelsea Finn , Stefano Ermon

A key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is reward (mis)specification, whereby imprecisely defined reward functions can result in unintended, possibly harmful, behaviours. Indeed, reward functions in RL are typically treated as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Daniel Donnelly , Angelo Ferrando , Francesco Belardinelli

Reward design remains a significant bottleneck in applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. A popular alternative is reward learning, where reward functions are inferred from human feedback rather than manually specified.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Chaitanya Kharyal , Calarina Muslimani , Matthew E. Taylor

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has driven recent progress in code large language models by leveraging execution-based feedback from unit tests, but its scalability is fundamentally constrained by the availability and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Xiao Zhu , Xinyu Zhou , Boyu Zhu , Hanxu Hu , Mingzhe Du , Haotian Zhang , Huiming Wang , Zhijiang Guo

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in software development, yet their tendency to generate insecure code remains a major barrier to real-world deployment. Existing secure code alignment methods often suffer from a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Tianyi Wu , Mingzhe Du , Yue Liu , Chengran Yang , Terry Yue Zhuo , Jiaheng Zhang , See-Kiong Ng

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great potential in refining robotic manipulation policies, yet its efficacy remains strongly bottlenecked by the difficulty of designing generalizable reward functions. In this paper, we propose a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yanru Wu , Weiduo Yuan , Ang Qi , Vitor Guizilini , Jiageng Mao , Yue Wang

One of the biggest hurdles robotics faces is the facet of sophisticated and hard-to-engineer behaviors. Reinforcement learning offers a set of tools, and a framework to address this problem. In parallel, the misgivings of robotics offer a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Akash Nagaraj , Mukund Sood , Bhagya M Patil

Designing effective reward functions is a cornerstone of reinforcement learning (RL), yet it remains a challenging and labor-intensive process due to the inefficiencies and inconsistencies inherent in traditional methods. Existing methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Shentong Mo

Reinforcement learning (RL) depends critically on the choice of reward functions used to capture the de- sired behavior and constraints of a robot. Usually, these are handcrafted by a expert designer and represent heuristics for relatively…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-03-03 Xiao Li , Cristian-Ioan Vasile , Calin Belta

Transfer of recent advances in deep reinforcement learning to real-world applications is hindered by high data demands and thus low efficiency and scalability. Through independent improvements of components such as replay buffers or more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 André Eberhard , Houssam Metni , Georg Fahland , Alexander Stroh , Pascal Friederich

Reward Machines provide an automaton-inspired structure for specifying instructions, safety constraints, and other temporally extended reward-worthy behaviour. By exposing the underlying structure of a reward function, they enable the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Andrew C. Li , Zizhao Chen , Toryn Q. Klassen , Pashootan Vaezipoor , Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Sheila A. McIlraith

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework for solving sequential decision-making problems. In this work, we demonstrate that, surprisingly, RL emerges during the inference time of large language models (LLMs), a phenomenon we term…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Kefan Song , Amir Moeini , Peng Wang , Lei Gong , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang , Yanjun Qi

To convey desired behavior to a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, a designer must choose a reward function for the environment, arguably the most important knob designers have in interacting with RL agents. Although many reward functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Henry Sowerby , Zhiyuan Zhou , Michael L. Littman

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited extraordinary performance in a variety of tasks while it remains challenging for them to solve complex multi-step tasks as agents. In practice, agents sensitive to the outcome of certain key steps…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Zilong Wang , Jingfeng Yang , Sreyashi Nag , Samarth Varshney , Xianfeng Tang , Haoming Jiang , Jingbo Shang , Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar

Code generation, which aims to automatically generate source code from given programming requirements, has the potential to substantially improve software development efficiency. With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs),…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Shouyu Yin , Zhao Tian , Junjie Chen , Shikai Guo

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely used in training large language models (LLMs) for preventing unexpected outputs, eg reducing harmfulness and errors. However, existing RL methods mostly adopt the instance-level reward, which is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Zhipeng Chen , Kun Zhou , Wayne Xin Zhao , Junchen Wan , Fuzheng Zhang , Di Zhang , Ji-Rong Wen

The increasing design complexity of System-on-Chips (SoCs) has led to significant verification challenges, particularly in meeting coverage targets within a timely manner. At present, coverage closure is heavily dependent on constrained…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Deepak Narayan Gadde , Thomas Nalapat , Aman Kumar , Djones Lettnin , Wolfgang Kunz , Sebastian Simon

Large language models are typically aligned with human preferences by optimizing $\textit{reward models}$ (RMs) fitted to human feedback. However, human preferences are multi-faceted, and it is increasingly common to derive reward from a…