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In reinforcement learning, the optimism in the face of uncertainty (OFU) is a mainstream principle for directing exploration towards less explored areas, characterized by higher uncertainty. However, in the presence of environmental…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-21 Jinyi Liu , Zhi Wang , Yan Zheng , Jianye Hao , Chenjia Bai , Junjie Ye , Zhen Wang , Haiyin Piao , Yang Sun

Deep latent variable models have achieved significant empirical successes in model-based reinforcement learning (RL) due to their expressiveness in modeling complex transition dynamics. On the other hand, it remains unclear theoretically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Tongzheng Ren , Chenjun Xiao , Tianjun Zhang , Na Li , Zhaoran Wang , Sujay Sanghavi , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

Reinforcement learning struggles in the face of long-horizon tasks and sparse goals due to the difficulty in manual reward specification. While existing methods address this by adding intrinsic rewards, they may fail to provide meaningful…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Zeyuan Liu , Ziyu Huan , Xiyao Wang , Jiafei Lyu , Jian Tao , Xiu Li , Furong Huang , Huazhe Xu

Model-based deep reinforcement learning has achieved success in various domains that require high sample efficiencies, such as Go and robotics. However, there are some remaining issues, such as planning efficient explorations to learn more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Yao Yao , Li Xiao , Zhicheng An , Wanpeng Zhang , Dijun Luo

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) offers a compelling approach to offline RL by enabling value learning on imagined on-policy trajectories. However, it often suffers from compounding errors due to repeated model inference on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Hojun Chung , Junseo Lee , Songhwai Oh

World models predict state transitions in response to actions and are increasingly developed across diverse modalities. However, standard training objectives such as maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) often misalign with task-specific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Jialong Wu , Shaofeng Yin , Ningya Feng , Mingsheng Long

Large Language Models (LLMs) are emerging as promising tools for automated reinforcement learning (RL) reward design, owing to their robust capabilities in commonsense reasoning and code generation. By engaging in dialogues with RL agents,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-14 Zen Kit Heng , Zimeng Zhao , Tianhao Wu , Yuanfei Wang , Mingdong Wu , Yangang Wang , Hao Dong

Reward models are crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and intentions. Existing approaches follow either Generative (GRMs) or Discriminative (DRMs) paradigms, yet both suffer from limitations: GRMs typically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Longze Chen , Lu Wang , Renke Shan , Ze Gong , Run Luo , Jiaming Li , Jing Luo , Qiyao Wang , Min Yang

We propose a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm inspired by the popular randomized least squares value iteration (RLSVI) algorithm as well as the optimism principle. Unlike existing upper-confidence-bound (UCB) based approaches,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Haque Ishfaq , Qiwen Cui , Viet Nguyen , Alex Ayoub , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Doina Precup , Lin F. Yang

Exploration in reinforcement learning is a challenging problem: in the worst case, the agent must search for high-reward states that could be hidden anywhere in the state space. Can we define a more tractable class of RL problems, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Kevin Li , Abhishek Gupta , Ashwin Reddy , Vitchyr Pong , Aurick Zhou , Justin Yu , Sergey Levine

In real-world tasks, reinforcement learning (RL) agents frequently encounter situations that are not present during training time. To ensure reliable performance, the RL agents need to exhibit robustness against worst-case situations. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Sebastian Curi , Ilija Bogunovic , Andreas Krause

Language model alignment (or, reinforcement learning) techniques that leverage active exploration -- deliberately encouraging the model to produce diverse, informative responses -- offer the promise of super-human capabilities. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Dylan J. Foster , Zakaria Mhammedi , Dhruv Rohatgi

Diffusion-based world models have demonstrated strong capabilities in synthesizing realistic long-horizon trajectories for offline reinforcement learning (RL). However, many existing methods do not directly generate actions alongside states…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Zongyue Li , Xiao Han , Yusong Li , Niklas Strauss , Matthias Schubert

Optimistic exploration is central to improving sample efficiency in reinforcement learning with human feedback, yet existing exploratory bonus methods to incentivize exploration often fail to realize optimism. We provide a theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Wendi Li , Changdae Oh , Sharon Li

Reward models (RMs) are essential for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, they often struggle with capturing complex human preferences and generalizing to unseen data. To address these challenges, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Anamika Lochab , Ruqi Zhang

Risk sensitivity has become a central theme in reinforcement learning (RL), where convex risk measures and robust formulations provide principled ways to model preferences beyond expected return. Recent extensions to multi-agent RL (MARL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Runyu Zhang , Na Li , Asuman Ozdaglar , Jeff Shamma , Gioele Zardini

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a key approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, prevalent RL approaches like proximal policy optimization and group relative policy optimization suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jingtong Gao , Ling Pan , Yejing Wang , Rui Zhong , Chi Lu , Maolin Wang , Qingpeng Cai , Peng Jiang , Xiangyu Zhao

Humans leverage rich internal models of the world to reason about the future, imagine counterfactuals, and adapt flexibly to new situations. In Reinforcement Learning (RL), world models aim to capture how the environment evolves in response…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Léopold Maytié , Roland Bertin Johannet , Rufin VanRullen

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved impressive results in robotics, yet high-performing pipelines remain highly task-specific, with little reuse of prior data. Offline Model-based RL (MBRL) offers greater data efficiency by training…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Chenhao Li , Andreas Krause , Marco Hutter

We study the problem of exploration in Reinforcement Learning and present a novel model-free solution. We adopt an information-theoretical viewpoint and start from the instance-specific lower bound of the number of samples that have to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere