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We propose a generic reward shaping approach for improving the rate of convergence in reinforcement learning (RL), called Self Improvement Based REwards, or SIBRE. The approach is designed for use in conjunction with any existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-22 Somjit Nath , Richa Verma , Abhik Ray , Harshad Khadilkar

(This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible.) To improve the efficiency of deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Gang Peng , Jin Yang , Xinde Lia , Mohammad Omar Khyam

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have recently achieved significant progress in complex reasoning tasks, aided by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. However, LRMs often suffer from overthinking, expending excessive computation on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Chuhuai Yue , Chengqi Dong , Yinan Gao , Hang He , Jiajun Chai , Guojun Yin , Wei Lin

Recently, adversarial imitation learning has shown a scalable reward acquisition method for inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problems. However, estimated reward signals often become uncertain and fail to train a reliable statistical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-06 Dong-Sig Han , Hyunseo Kim , Hyundo Lee , Je-Hwan Ryu , Byoung-Tak Zhang

Process reward models (PRMs) allow for fine-grained credit assignment in reinforcement learning (RL), and seemingly contrast with outcome reward models (ORMs), which assign a single reward to an entire trajectory. However, we provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Michael Sullivan , Alexander Koller

Modern recommender systems must adapt to dynamic, need-specific objectives for diverse recommendation scenarios, yet most traditional recommenders are optimized for a single static target and struggle to reconfigure behavior on demand.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Yijun Pan , Weikang Qiu , Qiyao Ma , Mingxuan Ju , Tong Zhao , Neil Shah , Rex Ying

Existing prompt-optimization techniques rely on local signals to update behavior, often neglecting broader and recurring patterns across tasks, leading to poor generalization; they further rely on full-prompt rewrites or unstructured…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Balaji Dinesh Gangireddi , Aniketh Garikaparthi , Manasi Patwardhan , Arman Cohan

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) is a paradigm in which an RL agent learns to optimize a task using pair-wise preference-based feedback over trajectories, rather than explicit reward signals. While PbRL has demonstrated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Wenhao Zhan , Masatoshi Uehara , Wen Sun , Jason D. Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) requires skillful definition and remarkable computational efforts to solve optimization and control problems, which could impair its prospect. Introducing human guidance into reinforcement learning is a promising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-30 Jingda Wu , Zhiyu Huang , Wenhui Huang , Chen Lv

Techniques that learn improved representations via offline data or self-supervised objectives have shown impressive results in traditional reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, it is unclear how improved representation learning can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Vaskar Nath , Dylan Slack , Jeff Da , Yuntao Ma , Hugh Zhang , Spencer Whitehead , Sean Hendryx

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly capable of following instructions and complex reasoning, making prompting a flexible interface for adapting models without parameter updates. Yet prompt design remains labor-intensive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Farima Fatahi Bayat , Moin Aminnaseri , Pouya Pezeshkpour , Estevam Hruschka

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in solving complex problems through reinforcement learning (RL), particularly by generating long reasoning traces. However, these extended outputs often exhibit substantial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Wei Liu , Ruochen Zhou , Yiyun Deng , Yuzhen Huang , Junteng Liu , Yuntian Deng , Yizhe Zhang , Junxian He

AI-based peer review systems tend to produce shallow and overpraising suggestions compared to human feedback. Here, we evaluate how well a reasoning LLM trained with multi-objective reinforcement learning (REMOR) can overcome these…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Pawin Taechoyotin , Daniel Acuna

Reward function is essential in reinforcement learning (RL), serving as the guiding signal to incentivize agents to solve given tasks, however, is also notoriously difficult to design. In many cases, only imperfect rewards are available,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Jianxiong Li , Xiao Hu , Haoran Xu , Jingjing Liu , Xianyuan Zhan , Qing-Shan Jia , Ya-Qin Zhang

Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting challenge in deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Despite dramatic improvements have been made, the problem is far from being solved and is especially challenging in environments with sparse or delayed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Federico Malato , Ville Hautamaki

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) aligns a robot behavior with human preferences via a reward function learned from binary feedback over agent behaviors. We show that dynamics-aware reward functions improve the sample…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-29 Katherine Metcalf , Miguel Sarabia , Natalie Mackraz , Barry-John Theobald

In many real-world applications, it is hard to provide a reward signal in each step of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) process and more natural to give feedback when an episode ends. To this end, we study the recently proposed model of RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Asaf Cassel , Haipeng Luo , Aviv Rosenberg , Dmitry Sotnikov

Policy optimization for large language models often suffers from sparse reward signals in multi-step reasoning tasks. Critic-free methods like GRPO assign a single normalized outcome reward to all tokens, providing limited guidance for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Ruiyi Ding , Yongxuan Lv , Xianhui Meng , Jiahe Song , Chao Wang , Chen Jiang , Yuan Cheng

Reward models (RMs) are critical for aligning Large Language Models via Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). While Generative Reward Models (GRMs) achieve superior accuracy through chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, they incur…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Jiayun Wu , Peixu Hou , Shan Qu , Peng Zhang , Ning Gu , Tun Lu