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Reliable uncertainty quantification is crucial for reinforcement learning (RL) in high-stakes settings. We propose a unified conformal prediction framework for infinite-horizon policy evaluation that constructs distribution-free prediction…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-31 Feichen Gan , Youcun Lu , Yingying Zhang , Yukun Liu

We introduce a method to address goal misgeneralization in reinforcement learning (RL), leveraging Large Language Model (LLM) feedback during training. Goal misgeneralization, a type of robustness failure in RL occurs when an agent retains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Houda Nait El Barj , Theophile Sautory

The challenge of developing powerful and general Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents has received increasing attention in recent years. Much of this effort has focused on the single-agent setting, in which an agent maximizes a predefined…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-21 Jiachen Yang , Ang Li , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Peter Sunehag , Edward Hughes , Hongyuan Zha

Credit assignment in Meta-reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is still poorly understood. Existing methods either neglect credit assignment to pre-adaptation behavior or implement it naively. This leads to poor sample-efficiency during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-14 Jonas Rothfuss , Dennis Lee , Ignasi Clavera , Tamim Asfour , Pieter Abbeel

For many reinforcement learning (RL) applications, specifying a reward is difficult. This paper considers an RL setting where the agent obtains information about the reward only by querying an expert that can, for example, evaluate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 David Lindner , Matteo Turchetta , Sebastian Tschiatschek , Kamil Ciosek , Andreas Krause

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated significant potential for generalist robotic policies; however, they struggle to generalize to long-horizon complex tasks in novel real-world domains due to distribution shifts and the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Zhian Su , Weijie Kong , Haonan Dong , Huixu Dong

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown its promising capabilities to learn optimal policies directly from trial and error. However, learning can be hindered if the goal of the learning, defined by the reward function, is "not optimal".…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-10-09 Yizheng Zhang , Andre Rosendo

Credit assignment is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning, the problem of measuring an action's influence on future rewards. Explicit credit assignment methods have the potential to boost the performance of RL algorithms on many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Vyacheslav Alipov , Riley Simmons-Edler , Nikita Putintsev , Pavel Kalinin , Dmitry Vetrov

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite its efficacy, RLVR faces a meta-learning bottleneck: it lacks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Shiting Huang , Zecheng Li , Yu Zeng , Qingnan Ren , Zhen Fang , Qisheng Su , Kou Shi , Lin Chen , Zehui Chen , Feng Zhao

The problem of sparse rewards is one of the hardest challenges in contemporary reinforcement learning. Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) tackles this problem by using a set of temporally-extended actions, or options, each of which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-14 Nat Dilokthanakul , Christos Kaplanis , Nick Pawlowski , Murray Shanahan

Empowerment, an information-theoretic measure of an agent's potential influence on its environment, has emerged as a powerful intrinsic motivation and exploration framework for reinforcement learning (RL). Besides for unsupervised RL and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Moritz Schneider , Robert Krug , Narunas Vaskevicius , Luigi Palmieri , Michael Volpp , Joschka Boedecker

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) has proven to be a successful framework for leveraging experience from prior tasks to rapidly learn new related tasks, however, current meta-RL approaches struggle to learn in sparse reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-12-03 Charles Packer , Pieter Abbeel , Joseph E. Gonzalez

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been a main driver of recent breakthroughs in large reasoning models. Yet it remains a mystery how rewards based solely on final outcomes can help overcome the long-horizon barrier…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Yu Huang , Zixin Wen , Yuejie Chi , Yuting Wei , Aarti Singh , Yingbin Liang , Yuxin Chen

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework to optimize a control policy using rewards that are revealed by the system as a response to a control action. In its standard form, RL involves a single agent that uses its policy to accomplish a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-11-24 Juan Cervino , Juan Andres Bazerque , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro

Providing a suitable reward function to reinforcement learning can be difficult in many real world applications. While inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) holds promise for automatically learning reward functions from demonstrations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Lantao Yu , Tianhe Yu , Chelsea Finn , Stefano Ermon

Reinforcement learning (RL) marks a fundamental shift in how artificial intelligence is applied in healthcare. Instead of merely predicting outcomes, RL actively decides interventions with long term goals. Unlike traditional models that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Dilruk Perera , Gousia Habib , Qianyi Xu , Daniel J. Tan , Kai He , Erik Cambria , Mengling Feng

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a central technique for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. Despite its effectiveness, how response-level rewards translate into token-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Kaiyi Zhang , Wei Wu , Yankai Lin

Reinforcement learning (RL) has substantially improved the ability of large language model (LLM) agents to interact with environments and solve multi-turn tasks. However, effective agentic RL remains challenging: sparse outcome-only rewards…

Our goal is for agents to optimize the right reward function, despite how difficult it is for us to specify what that is. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) enables us to infer reward functions from demonstrations, but it usually assumes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Rohin Shah , Noah Gundotra , Pieter Abbeel , Anca D. Dragan

We consider un-discounted reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under temporal drifts, ie, both the reward and state transition distributions are allowed to evolve over time, as long as their respective total…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Wang Chi Cheung , David Simchi-Levi , Ruihao Zhu