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Deep learning has achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning (RL) problems when dense reward function is provided. However, in sparse reward environment it still often suffers from the need to carefully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Hao Liu , Alexander Trott , Richard Socher , Caiming Xiong

Dense process rewards have proven a more effective alternative to the sparse outcome-level rewards in the inference-time scaling of large language models (LLMs), particularly in tasks requiring complex multi-step reasoning. While dense…

Any reinforcement learning algorithm that applies to all Markov decision processes (MDPs) will suffer $\Omega(\sqrt{SAT})$ regret on some MDP, where $T$ is the elapsed time and $S$ and $A$ are the cardinalities of the state and action…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-11-04 Ian Osband , Benjamin Van Roy

Regret matching (RM) -- and its modern variants -- is a foundational online algorithm that has been at the heart of many AI breakthrough results in solving benchmark zero-sum games, such as poker. Yet, surprisingly little is known so far in…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Ioannis Anagnostides , Emanuel Tewolde , Brian Hu Zhang , Ioannis Panageas , Vincent Conitzer , Tuomas Sandholm

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that users specify tasks by manually writing down a reward function. However, this process can be laborious and demands considerable technical expertise. Can we devise RL algorithms that instead…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Designing an effective reward function has long been a challenge in reinforcement learning, particularly for complex tasks in unstructured environments. To address this, various learning paradigms have emerged that leverage different forms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Muhammad Qasim Elahi , Somtochukwu Oguchienti , Maheed H. Ahmed , Mahsa Ghasemi

Reward modeling is essential for aligning large language models with human preferences through reinforcement learning. To provide accurate reward signals, a reward model (RM) should stimulate deep thinking and conduct interpretable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Xiusi Chen , Gaotang Li , Ziqi Wang , Bowen Jin , Cheng Qian , Yu Wang , Hongru Wang , Yu Zhang , Denghui Zhang , Tong Zhang , Hanghang Tong , Heng Ji

Balancing exploration and exploitation is crucial in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we study model-based posterior sampling for reinforcement learning (PSRL) in continuous state-action spaces theoretically and empirically.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-18 Ying Fan , Yifei Ming

Although Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have found tremendous success in simulated domains, they often cannot directly be applied to physical systems, especially in cases where there are hard constraints to satisfy (e.g. on safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-28 Harsh Satija , Philip Amortila , Joelle Pineau

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as "agents" for decision-making (DM) in interactive and dynamic environments. Yet, since they were not originally designed for DM, recent studies show that LLMs can struggle even in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Chanwoo Park , Ziyang Chen , Asuman Ozdaglar , Kaiqing Zhang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) traditionally relies on scalar reward signals, limiting its ability to leverage the rich semantic knowledge often available in real-world tasks. In contrast, humans learn efficiently by combining numerical…

Achieving sample efficiency in online episodic reinforcement learning (RL) requires optimally balancing exploration and exploitation. When it comes to a finite-horizon episodic Markov decision process with $S$ states, $A$ actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Gen Li , Laixi Shi , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi

In unsupervised environment design, reinforcement learning agents are trained on environment configurations (levels) generated by an adversary that maximises some objective. Regret is a commonly used objective that theoretically results in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Michael Beukman , Samuel Coward , Michael Matthews , Mattie Fellows , Minqi Jiang , Michael Dennis , Jakob Foerster

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

Recent advancements in flow-matching have enabled high-quality text-to-image generation. However, the deterministic nature of flow-matching models makes them poorly suited for reinforcement learning, a key tool for improving image quality…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Benjamin Yu , Jackie Liu , Justin Cui

We present a new algorithm based on posterior sampling for learning in Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDP) in the infinite-horizon undiscounted setting. The algorithm achieves near-optimal regret bounds while being advantageous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Danil Provodin , Maurits Kaptein , Mykola Pechenizkiy

We consider the problem of preference based reinforcement learning (PbRL), where, unlike traditional reinforcement learning, an agent receives feedback only in terms of a 1 bit (0/1) preference over a trajectory pair instead of absolute…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Aldo Pacchiano , Aadirupa Saha , Jonathan Lee

The online meta-learning framework has arisen as a powerful tool for the continual lifelong learning setting. The goal for an agent is to quickly learn new tasks by drawing on prior experience, while it faces with tasks one after another.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Parvin Nazari , Esmaile Khorram

Contemporary reinforcement learning with verifiable reward methods post-train language models on multi-step reasoning by assigning a single outcome reward uniformly across all tokens in a trajectory. Such uniform assignment ignores which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Ankur Samanta , Akshayaa Magesh , Ayush Jain , Youliang Yu , Daniel Jiang , Kavosh Asadi , Kaveh Hassani , Paul Sajda , Jalaj Bhandari , Yonathan Efroni

Reward models (RMs) are crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. They are trained using preference datasets where each example consists of one input prompt, two responses, and a preference label. As curating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Jiaming Shen , Ran Xu , Yennie Jun , Zhen Qin , Tianqi Liu , Carl Yang , Yi Liang , Simon Baumgartner , Michael Bendersky