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We study the model-based undiscounted reinforcement learning for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). The oracle we consider is the optimal policy of the POMDP with a known environment in terms of the average reward over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Yi Xiong , Ningyuan Chen , Xuefeng Gao , Xiang Zhou

In reinforcement learning, experience replay stores past samples for further reuse. Prioritized sampling is a promising technique to better utilize these samples. Previous criteria of prioritization include TD error, recentness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Xu-Hui Liu , Zhenghai Xue , Jing-Cheng Pang , Shengyi Jiang , Feng Xu , Yang Yu

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…

The theory of reinforcement learning has focused on two fundamental problems: achieving low regret, and identifying $\epsilon$-optimal policies. While a simple reduction allows one to apply a low-regret algorithm to obtain an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Andrew Wagenmaker , Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson

Process Reward Modeling (PRM) is critical for complex reasoning and decision-making tasks where the accuracy of intermediate steps significantly influences the overall outcome. Existing PRM approaches, primarily framed as classification…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Wendi Li , Yixuan Li

Scaling test-time computation with reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a reliable path to improve large language models (LLM) reasoning ability. Yet, outcome-based reward often incentivizes models to be overconfident, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Liaoyaqi Wang , Chunsheng Zuo , William Jurayj , Benjamin Van Durme , Anqi Liu

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate strong performance in complex tasks but often face the challenge of overthinking, leading to substantially high inference costs. Existing approaches synthesize shorter reasoning responses for LRMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Hexuan Deng , Wenxiang Jiao , Xuebo Liu , Jun Rao , Min Zhang

In this paper, we propose a new solution to reward adaptation (RA) in reinforcement learning, where the agent adapts to a target reward function based on one or more existing source behaviors learned a priori under the same domain dynamics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Kevin Vora , Yu Zhang

Process Reward Models (PRMs), which assign fine-grained scores to intermediate reasoning steps within a solution trajectory, have emerged as a promising approach to enhance the reasoning quality of Large Language Models (LLMs). However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Lingyin Zhang , Jun Gao , Xiaoxue Ren , Ziqiang Cao

Enhancing the mathematical reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) is of great scientific and practical significance. Researchers typically employ process-supervised reward models (PRMs) to guide the reasoning process,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Wei Sun , Qianlong Du , Fuwei Cui , Jiajun Zhang

We study reinforcement learning from human feedback in general Markov decision processes, where agents learn from trajectory-level preference comparisons. A central challenge in this setting is to design algorithms that select informative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Reda Ouhamma , Maryam Kamgarpour

While large language models excel in diverse domains, their performance on complex longhorizon agentic decision-making tasks remains limited. Most existing methods concentrate on designing effective reward models (RMs) to advance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Zhicong Lu , Zichuan Lin , Wei Jia , Changyuan Tian , Deheng Ye , Peiguang Li , Li Jin , Nayu Liu , Guangluan Xu , Wei Feng

Proactive Recommender Systems (PRSs) aim to guide user preference shift toward target items by generating paths of intermediate recommendations. Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a principled framework for optimizing such sequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Hongru Hou , Tiehua Mei , Denghui Geng , Jinhui Huang , Ao Xu , Hengrui Chen , Jiaqing Liang , Deqing Yang

Process Reward Models (PRMs) have emerged as a powerful tool for providing step-level feedback when evaluating the reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs), which frequently produce chains of thought (CoTs) containing errors even when the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Raffaele Pisano , Roberto Navigli

The goal of imitation learning is to mimic expert behavior from demonstrations, without access to an explicit reward signal. A popular class of approach infers the (unknown) reward function via inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) followed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-19 Carl Qi , Pieter Abbeel , Aditya Grover

Reinforcement learning (RL) so far has limited real-world applications. One key challenge is that typical RL algorithms heavily rely on a reset mechanism to sample proper initial states; these reset mechanisms, in practice, are expensive to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Hoai-An Nguyen , Ching-An Cheng

The success of reinforcement learning in typical settings is predicated on Markovian assumptions on the reward signal by which an agent learns optimal policies. In recent years, the use of reward machines has relaxed this assumption by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Taylor Dohmen , Noah Topper , George Atia , Andre Beckus , Ashutosh Trivedi , Alvaro Velasquez

Controlled text generation tasks such as unsupervised text style transfer have increasingly adopted the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL). A major challenge in applying RL to such tasks is the sparse reward, which is available only after…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-19 Bhargav Upadhyay , Akhilesh Sudhakar , Arjun Maheswaran

A promising way to improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning is model-based methods, in which many explorations and evaluations can happen in the learned models to save real-world samples. However, when the learned model has a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-14 Haoxin Lin , Yihao Sun , Jiaji Zhang , Yang Yu

We consider the problem where $M$ agents interact with $M$ identical and independent environments with $S$ states and $A$ actions using reinforcement learning for $T$ rounds. The agents share their data with a central server to minimize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-23 Mridul Agarwal , Bhargav Ganguly , Vaneet Aggarwal