Related papers: ReCast: Recasting Learning Signals for Reinforceme…

Single-task RL agents are typically trained under a fixed reward function, which limits their robustness to reward misspecification and their ability to adapt to changing preferences. We introduce Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective approach to learn an optimal dialog policy for task-oriented visual dialog systems. A common practice is to apply RL on a neural sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) framework with the action space…

This dissertation investigates how reinforcement learning (RL) methods can be designed to be safe, sample-efficient, and robust. Framed through the unifying perspective of contextual-bandit RL, the work addresses two major application…

Consistent image generation requires faithfully preserving identities, styles, and logical coherence across multiple images, which is essential for applications such as storytelling and character design. Supervised training approaches…

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…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has delivered impressive gains in mathematical and multimodal reasoning and has become a standard post-training paradigm for contemporary language and vision-language models. However,…

The integration of reinforcement learning (RL) into large language models (LLMs) has opened new opportunities for recommender systems by eliciting reasoning and improving user preference modeling. However, RL-based LLM recommendation faces…

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…

Reinforcement learning (RL) faces substantial challenges when applied to real-life problems, primarily stemming from the scarcity of available data due to limited interactions with the environment. This limitation is exacerbated by the fact…

Code-agent RL often receives weak feedback: rollout-time signals are reliable and executable, but capture only necessary or surface conditions for task success rather than the target semantic predicate. Using agentic compile-fix as the…

We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…

Generative foundation models are susceptible to implicit biases that can arise from extensive unsupervised training data. Such biases can produce suboptimal samples, skewed outcomes, and unfairness, with potentially serious consequences.…

In session-based or sequential recommendation, it is important to consider a number of factors like long-term user engagement, multiple types of user-item interactions such as clicks, purchases etc. The current state-of-the-art supervised…

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…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is the dominant paradigm for post-training large language models. However, in the online, on-policy setting, rollout generation dominates the computational cost of training. Group-based policy optimization…

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) for software engineering spends much of its compute on stateful trajectories whose grouped binary rewards are highly skewed and weakly contrastive. We frame this as pass-rate control and show that the…

Referring expression counting (REC) is an intention-driven task that requires context-aware visual reasoning. While recent vision-language models incorporate language for visual understanding, most existing REC methods rely on rulebased…

Reinforcement learning significantly enhances LLM capabilities but suffers from a critical issue: length inflation, where models adopt verbosity or inefficient reasoning to maximize rewards. Prior approaches struggle to address this…

A major obstacle to developing artificial intelligence applications capable of true lifelong learning is that artificial neural networks quickly or catastrophically forget previously learned tasks when trained on a new one. Numerous methods…

In natural language processing tasks, pure reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning methods often suffer from inefficient exploration and slow convergence; while supervised fine-tuning (SFT) methods, although efficient in training, have…