Related papers: PiCA: Pivot-Based Credit Assignment for Search Age…

Efficient credit assignment is essential for reinforcement learning algorithms in both prediction and control settings. We describe a unified view on temporal-difference algorithms for selective credit assignment. These selective algorithms…

Critic-free reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves code generation by optimizing unit-test pass rates, but GRPO-style updates suffer from coarse credit assignment: a single outcome signal is spread uniformly across…

To date, distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) methods have exclusively focused on the discounted setting, where an agent aims to optimize a discounted sum of rewards over time. In this work, we extend distributional RL…

Modern recommender systems must adapt to dynamic, need-specific objectives for diverse recommendation scenarios, yet most traditional recommenders are optimized for a single static target and struggle to reconfigure behavior on demand.…

Sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) can model a wide range of highly complex tasks. Solving sparse-reward tasks is RL's core premise, requiring efficient exploration coupled with long-horizon credit assignment, and overcoming these…

Many reinforcement learning environments (e.g., Minecraft) provide only sparse rewards that indicate task completion or failure with binary values. The challenge in exploration efficiency in such environments makes it difficult for…

Speech large language models (LLMs) have driven significant progress in end-to-end speech understanding and recognition, yet they continue to struggle with accurately recognizing rare words and domain-specific terminology. This paper…

Large Language Model (LLM) agents often face significant credit assignment challenges in long-horizon, multi-step tasks due to sparse rewards. Existing value-free methods, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), encounter two…

Training neural networks with discrete stochastic variables presents a unique challenge. Backpropagation is not directly applicable, nor are the reparameterization tricks used in networks with continuous stochastic variables. To address…

Recent advancements in financial problem-solving have leveraged LLMs and agent-based systems, with a primary focus on trading and financial modeling. However, credit assessment remains an underexplored challenge, traditionally dependent on…

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) entails a variety of approaches for aligning models with human intent to alleviate the burden of reward engineering. However, most previous PbRL work has not investigated the robustness to…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning abilities in mathematical tasks, often enhanced through reinforcement learning (RL). However, RL-trained models frequently produce unnecessarily long reasoning traces -- even…

Biological brains are inherently limited in their capacity to process and store information, but are nevertheless capable of solving complex tasks with apparent ease. Intelligent behavior is related to these limitations, since resource…

Learning Automata (LA) are considered as one of the most powerful tools in the field of reinforcement learning. The family of estimator algorithms is proposed to improve the convergence rate of LA and has made great achievements. However,…

Process Reward Models (PRMs), which assign fine-grained scores to intermediate reasoning steps within a solution trajectory, have emerged as a promising approach to enhance the reasoning quality of Large Language Models (LLMs). However,…

While recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven useful in answering user queries, they are prone to hallucination, and their responses often lack credibility due to missing references to reliable sources. An intuitive solution to…

Reliable deployment of large language models (LLMs) requires accurate uncertainty estimation. Existing methods are predominantly answer-first, producing confidence only after generating an answer, which measure the correctness of a specific…

Despite rapid development, large language models (LLMs) still encounter challenges in multi-turn decision-making tasks (i.e., agent tasks) like web shopping and browser navigation, which require making a sequence of intelligent decisions…

Large language model (LLM)-based agents have shown promise in tackling complex tasks by interacting dynamically with the environment. Existing work primarily focuses on behavior cloning from expert demonstrations or preference learning…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as interactive agents, but optimizing them for long-horizon decision making remains difficult because current methods are largely purely reactive, which weakens both exploration and credit…