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Deep Research agents tackle knowledge-intensive tasks through multi-round retrieval and decision-oriented generation. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been shown to improve performance in this paradigm, its contributions remain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yinuo Xu , Shuo Lu , Jianjie Cheng , Meng Wang , Qianlong Xie , Xingxing Wang , Ran He , Jian Liang

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance in the face of uncertainties. In this paper, we focus on action robust RL with the probabilistic policy execution uncertainty, in which,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Guanlin Liu , Zhihan Zhou , Han Liu , Lifeng Lai

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms have led to recent successes in solving complex games, such as Atari or Starcraft, and to a huge impact in real-world applications, such as cybersecurity or autonomous driving. In the side of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Rubén Majadas , Javier García , Fernando Fernández

There has been significant progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) in recent years. Nevertheless, finding suitable hyperparameter configurations and reward functions remains challenging even for experts, and performance heavily relies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Julian Dierkes , Emma Cramer , Holger H. Hoos , Sebastian Trimpe

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

In the classical Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) framework, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is employed to learn from sparse, sentence-level rewards -- a challenging scenario in traditional deep reinforcement learning.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Han Zhong , Zikang Shan , Guhao Feng , Wei Xiong , Xinle Cheng , Li Zhao , Di He , Jiang Bian , Liwei Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in sequential decision tasks. However, recent studies have revealed the vulnerability of RL policies to different perturbations, raising concerns about their effectiveness and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Buqing Nie , Yangqing Fu , Jingtian Ji , Yue Gao

Large language models are commonly trained through multi-stage post-training: first via RLHF, then fine-tuned for other downstream objectives. Yet even small downstream updates can compromise earlier learned behaviors (e.g., safety),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Mahdi Sabbaghi , George Pappas , Adel Javanmard , Hamed Hassani

Recent studies reveal that a well-trained deep reinforcement learning (RL) policy can be particularly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations on input observations. Therefore, it is crucial to train RL agents that are robust against any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Yongyuan Liang , Yanchao Sun , Ruijie Zheng , Furong Huang

In many reinforcement learning (RL) applications, augmenting the task rewards with heuristic rewards that encode human priors about how a task should be solved is crucial for achieving desirable performance. However, because such heuristics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Chi-Chang Lee , Zhang-Wei Hong , Pulkit Agrawal

Bridging the gap between diffusion models and human preferences is crucial for their integration into practical generative workflows. While optimizing downstream reward models has emerged as a promising alignment strategy, concerns arise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Ziyi Zhang , Sen Zhang , Yibing Zhan , Yong Luo , Yonggang Wen , Dacheng Tao

Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Sourav Ganguly , Kishan Panaganti , Arnob Ghosh , Adam Wierman

Among the great successes of Reinforcement Learning (RL), self-play algorithms play an essential role in solving competitive games. Current self-play algorithms optimize the agent to maximize expected win-rates against its current or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Yuhua Jiang , Qihan Liu , Xiaoteng Ma , Chenghao Li , Yiqin Yang , Jun Yang , Bin Liang , Qianchuan Zhao

Reward functions are central in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding agents towards optimal decision-making. The complexity of RL tasks requires meticulously designed reward functions that effectively drive learning while avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Rati Devidze

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

In safe offline reinforcement learning (RL), the objective is to develop a policy that maximizes cumulative rewards while strictly adhering to safety constraints, utilizing only offline data. Traditional methods often face difficulties in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Prajwal Koirala , Zhanhong Jiang , Soumik Sarkar , Cody Fleming

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a critical technique for enhancing LLM-based deep search agents. However, existing approaches primarily rely on binary outcome rewards, which fail to capture the comprehensiveness and factuality of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Jiajie Zhang , Xin Lv , Ling Feng , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

This work tackles the problem of overoptimization in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), a prevalent technique for aligning models with human preferences. RLHF relies on reward or preference models trained on \emph{fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Dhawal Gupta , Adam Fisch , Christoph Dann , Alekh Agarwal

Policy-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) has established itself as the dominant paradigm in generative recommendation for optimizing sequential user interactions. However, when applied to offline historical logs, these methods suffer a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Jie Jiang , Yusen Huo , Xiangxin Zhan , Changping Wang , Jun Zhang

Large language model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance their ability to interact with external environments through tool use, particularly in search-based settings that require…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Guoqing Wang , Sunhao Dai , Guangze Ye , Zeyu Gan , Wei Yao , Yong Deng , Xiaofeng Wu , Zhenzhe Ying