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Related papers: Sparse Reward Subsystem in Large Language Models

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Inducing sparseness while training neural networks has been shown to yield models with a lower memory footprint but similar effectiveness to dense models. However, sparseness is typically induced starting from a dense model, and thus this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Thomas Demeester , Johannes Deleu , Fréderic Godin , Chris Develder

Sparse reward environments in reinforcement learning (RL) pose significant challenges for exploration, often leading to inefficient or incomplete learning processes. To tackle this issue, this work proposes a teacher-student RL framework…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Unai Ruiz-Gonzalez , Alain Andres , Pedro G. Bascoy , Javier Del Ser

Large language models (LLMs) continue to face challenges in reliably solving reasoning tasks, particularly those that require precise rule following, as often found in mathematical reasoning. This paper introduces a novel neurosymbolic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Varun Dhanraj , Chris Eliasmith

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently proven great success in various domains. Yet, the design of the reward function requires detailed domain expertise and tedious fine-tuning to ensure that agents are able to learn the desired…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Murad Dawood , Nils Dengler , Jorge de Heuvel , Maren Bennewitz

Designing effective reward functions is crucial to training reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. However, this design is non-trivial, even for domain experts, due to the subjective nature of certain tasks that are hard to quantify…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Rishi Hazra , Alkis Sygkounas , Andreas Persson , Amy Loutfi , Pedro Zuidberg Dos Martires

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in autonomous cyber defence agents trained to defend computer networks using deep reinforcement learning. These agents are typically trained in cyber gym environments using dense, highly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Elizabeth Bates , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

Large language models (LLMs) struggle with representing and generating rare tokens despite their importance in specialized domains. We investigate whether LLMs develop internal specialization mechanisms through discrete modular…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Jing Liu , Haozheng Wang , Yueheng Li

While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly used to generate reward signals for training embodied agents to follow instructions, our research reveals that agents guided by VLM rewards often underperform compared to those employing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Sukai Huang , Shu-Wei Liu , Nir Lipovetzky , Trevor Cohn

Process Reward Models (PRMs) have achieved strong results in complex reasoning, but are bottlenecked by costly process-level supervision. A widely used alternative, Monte Carlo Estimation (MCE), defines process rewards as the probability…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Bin Xie , Bingbing Xu , Xueyun Tian , Yilin Chen , Huawei Shen

We propose a large language model based reward decomposition framework for aligning dialogue agents using only a single session-level feedback signal. We leverage the reasoning capabilities of a frozen, pretrained large language model (LLM)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Dong Won Lee , Hae Won Park , Cynthia Breazeal , Louis-Philippe Morency

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP), and recent studies have aimed to understand their underlying mechanisms. However, most of this research is conducted within a monolingual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Weixuan Wang , Barry Haddow , Minghao Wu , Wei Peng , Alexandra Birch

This paper reviews exploration techniques in deep reinforcement learning. Exploration techniques are of primary importance when solving sparse reward problems. In sparse reward problems, the reward is rare, which means that the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Pawel Ladosz , Lilian Weng , Minwoo Kim , Hyondong Oh

Sparse-reward domains are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms since significant exploration is needed before encountering reward for the first time. Hierarchical reinforcement learning can facilitate exploration by reducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-13 Lorenzo Steccanella , Simone Totaro , Damien Allonsius , Anders Jonsson

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

We study how reliably sparse autoencoders (SAEs) support claims about reasoning-related internal features in large language models. We first give a stylized analysis showing that sparsity-regularized decoding can preferentially retain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 George Ma , Zhongyuan Liang , Irene Y. Chen , Somayeh Sojoudi

Large Language Models (LLMs) with extended reasoning capabilities often generate verbose and redundant reasoning traces, incurring unnecessary computational cost. While existing reinforcement learning approaches address this by optimizing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Chengwei Wei , Jung-jae Kim , Longyin Zhang , Shengkai Chen , Nancy F. Chen

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents require the specification of a reward signal for learning behaviours. However, introduction of corrupt or stochastic rewards can yield high variance in learning. Such corruption may be a direct result of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-09 Joshua Romoff , Peter Henderson , Alexandre Piché , Vincent Francois-Lavet , Joelle Pineau

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

One of the roadblocks to a better understanding of neural networks' internals is \textit{polysemanticity}, where neurons appear to activate in multiple, semantically distinct contexts. Polysemanticity prevents us from identifying concise,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Hoagy Cunningham , Aidan Ewart , Logan Riggs , Robert Huben , Lee Sharkey

Reward models (RMs) play a crucial role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences and enhancing reasoning quality. Traditionally, RMs are trained to rank candidate outputs based on their correctness and coherence.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Yuhui Xu , Hanze Dong , Lei Wang , Caiming Xiong , Junnan Li