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Large language model (LLM) agents learn by interacting with environments, but long-horizon training remains fundamentally bottlenecked by sparse and delayed rewards. Existing methods typically address this challenge through post-hoc credit…

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…

Extrinsic rewards can effectively guide reinforcement learning (RL) agents in specific tasks. However, extrinsic rewards frequently fall short in complex environments due to the significant human effort needed for their design and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Mingqi Yuan , Roger Creus Castanyer , Bo Li , Xin Jin , Wenjun Zeng , Glen Berseth

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

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to follow instructions with various constraints. Despite the encouraging results, RL improvement inevitably relies on sampling successful, high-quality…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Kongcheng Zhang , Qi Yao , Shunyu Liu , Wenjian Zhang , Min Cen , Yang Zhou , Wenkai Fang , Yiru Zhao , Baisheng Lai , Mingli Song

Solving multi-goal reinforcement learning (RL) problems with sparse rewards is generally challenging. Existing approaches have utilized goal relabeling on collected experiences to alleviate issues raised from sparse rewards. However, these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Rui Yang , Meng Fang , Lei Han , Yali Du , Feng Luo , Xiu Li

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

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

Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is an approach wherein the experience gained from solving a variety of tasks is distilled into a meta-policy. The meta-policy, when adapted over only a small (or just a single) number of steps, is able…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-28 Desik Rengarajan , Sapana Chaudhary , Jaewon Kim , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

Most reinforcement learning (RL) methods for training large language models (LLMs) require ground-truth labels or task-specific verifiers, limiting scalability when correctness is ambiguous or expensive to obtain. We introduce Reinforcement…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Micah Rentschler , Jesse Roberts

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in learned tasks, yet they often struggle to adapt to non-stationary environments with feedback. While In-Context Learning and external memory offer some…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Lu Yang , Zelai Xu , Minyang Xie , Jiaxuan Gao , Zhao Shok , Yu Wang , Yi Wu

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become a key factor in aligning model behavior with users' goals. However, while humans integrate multiple strategies when making decisions, current RLHF approaches often simplify this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Evelyn Rose , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

We consider the problem of learning from sparse and underspecified rewards, where an agent receives a complex input, such as a natural language instruction, and needs to generate a complex response, such as an action sequence, while only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Rishabh Agarwal , Chen Liang , Dale Schuurmans , Mohammad Norouzi

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to be often unsuccessful in environments with sparse extrinsic rewards. A possible countermeasure is to endow RL agents with an intrinsic reward function, or 'intrinsic motivation', which rewards the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Francesco Massari , Martin Biehl , Lisa Meeden , Ryota Kanai

Acquiring complex behaviors is essential for artificially intelligent agents, yet learning these behaviors in high-dimensional settings poses a significant challenge due to the vast search space. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Mert Albaba , Sammy Christen , Thomas Langarek , Christoph Gebhardt , Otmar Hilliges , Michael J. Black

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) scales the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) but remains bottlenecked by limited labeled samples for continued data scaling. Reinforcement learning with intrinsic rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Chuyi Tan , Peiwen Yuan , Xinglin Wang , Yiwei Li , Shaoxiong Feng , Yueqi Zhang , Jiayi Shi , Ji Zhang , Boyuan Pan , Yao Hu , Kan Li

Large language models can generate solutions to complex problems, but training them with reinforcement learning typically requires verifiable rewards that are expensive to create and not possible for all domains. We demonstrate that LLMs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Toby Simonds , Kevin Lopez , Akira Yoshiyama , Dominique Garmier

Dealing with sparse rewards is one of the biggest challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL). We present a novel technique called Hindsight Experience Replay which allows sample-efficient learning from rewards which are sparse and binary and…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising paradigm for post-training reasoning models. However, group-based methods such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) face a critical dilemma in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yuning Wu , Ke Wang , Devin Chen , Kai Wei