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Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm to solve a range of complex yet specific control tasks. Yet training generalist agents that can quickly adapt to new tasks remains an outstanding challenge. Recent advances…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Michael Laskin , Denis Yarats , Hao Liu , Kimin Lee , Albert Zhan , Kevin Lu , Catherine Cang , Lerrel Pinto , Pieter Abbeel

Reward models have been increasingly critical for improving the reasoning capability of LLMs. Existing research has shown that a well-trained reward model can substantially improve model performances at inference time via search. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Jiaxuan Gao , Shusheng Xu , Wenjie Ye , Weilin Liu , Chuyi He , Wei Fu , Zhiyu Mei , Guangju Wang , Yi Wu

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback relies on reward models to align large language models with human preferences. However, RLHF often suffers from reward hacking, wherein policy learning exploits flaws in the trained reward model to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Kangwen Zhao , Jianfeng Cai , Jinhua Zhu , Ruopei Sun , Dongyun Xue , Wengang Zhou , Li Li , Houqiang Li

Reward models (RMs) have become essential for aligning large language models (LLMs), serving as scalable proxies for human evaluation in both training and inference. However, existing RMs struggle on knowledge-intensive and long-form tasks,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Ziyou Hu , Zhengliang Shi , Minghang Zhu , Haitao Li , Teng Sun , Pengjie Ren , Suzan Verberne , Zhaochun Ren

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in automating scientific ideation, yet current approaches relying on iterative prompting or complex multi-agent architectures often suffer from hallucination or computational…

Reward models (RMs) guide the alignment of large language models (LLMs), steering them toward behaviors preferred by humans. Evaluating RMs is the key to better aligning LLMs. However, the current evaluation of RMs may not directly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Enyu Zhou , Guodong Zheng , Binghai Wang , Zhiheng Xi , Shihan Dou , Rong Bao , Wei Shen , Limao Xiong , Jessica Fan , Yurong Mou , Rui Zheng , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

While reinforcement learning (RL) enhances their ability to plan and reason across retrieval steps, we identify a critical failure mode in this setting: Tool-Call Hacking. Unlike execution-based tools (e.g., code or math), whose effects are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-26 SHengjie Ma , Chenlong Deng , Jiaxin Mao , Jiadeng Huang , Teng Wang , Junjie Wu , Changwang Zhang , Jun wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems have countless applications, from energy-grid management to protein design. However, such real-world scenarios are often extremely difficult, combinatorial in nature, and require complex coordination…

Reinforcement learning (RL) often struggles with reward misalignment, where agents optimize given rewards but fail to exhibit the desired behaviors. This arises when the reward function incentivizes proxy behaviors misaligned with the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Mohammad Saif Nazir , Chayan Banerjee

AI agents have become surprisingly proficient at software engineering over the past year, largely due to improvements in reasoning capabilities. This raises a deeper question: can these systems extend their capabilities to automate AI…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Ben Rank , Hardik Bhatnagar , Ameya Prabhu , Shira Eisenberg , Karina Nguyen , Matthias Bethge , Maksym Andriushchenko

In the Bayesian Reinforcement Learning (BRL) setting, agents try to maximise the collected rewards while interacting with their environment while using some prior knowledge that is accessed beforehand. Many BRL algorithms have already been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-09-28 Michael Castronovo , Damien Ernst , Adrien Couetoux , Raphael Fonteneau

Reinforcement learning has shown great promise in robotics thanks to its ability to develop efficient robotic control procedures through self-training. In particular, reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to solving the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Pierre Aumjaud , David McAuliffe , Francisco Javier Rodríguez Lera , Philip Cardiff

Because it is difficult to precisely specify complex objectives, reinforcement learning policies are often optimized using proxy reward functions that only approximate the true goal. However, optimizing proxy rewards frequently leads to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Cassidy Laidlaw , Shivam Singhal , Anca Dragan

Reward learning enables the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to tasks where reward is defined by human judgment, building a model of reward by asking humans questions. Most work on reward learning has used simulated environments,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-01-10 Daniel M. Ziegler , Nisan Stiennon , Jeffrey Wu , Tom B. Brown , Alec Radford , Dario Amodei , Paul Christiano , Geoffrey Irving

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) remains vulnerable to reward hacking, where models exploit spurious correlations in learned reward models to achieve high scores while violating human intent. Existing mitigations rely on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Mohammad Beigi , Ming Jin , Junshan Zhang , Qifan Wang , Lifu Huang

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Evan Zheran Liu , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Tianlin Shi , Percy Liang

Reward modeling (a.k.a., preference modeling) is instrumental for aligning large language models with human preferences, particularly within the context of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). While conventional reward models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Lei Li , Yekun Chai , Shuohuan Wang , Yu Sun , Hao Tian , Ningyu Zhang , Hua Wu

As large language models (LLMs) increasingly interact with external tools, reward modeling for tool use has emerged as a critical yet underexplored area of research. Existing reward models, trained primarily on natural language outputs,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Mayank Agarwal , Ibrahim Abdelaziz , Kinjal Basu , Merve Unuvar , Luis A. Lastras , Yara Rizk , Pavan Kapanipathi

We address the challenge of generating diverse attack prompts for large language models (LLMs) that elicit harmful behaviors (e.g., insults, sexual content) and are used for safety fine-tuning. Rather than relying on manual prompt…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Taeyoung Yun , Pierre-Luc St-Charles , Jinkyoo Park , Yoshua Bengio , Minsu Kim

LLM-based agent systems increasingly rely on agent skills sourced from open registries to extend their capabilities, yet the openness of such ecosystems makes skills difficult to thoroughly vet. Existing attacks rely on injecting malicious…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Zenghao Duan , Yuxin Tian , Zhiyi Yin , Liang Pang , Jingcheng Deng , Zihao Wei , Shicheng Xu , Yuyao Ge , Xueqi Cheng