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Recommender systems (RecSys) have become critical tools for enhancing user engagement by delivering personalized content across diverse digital platforms. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) demonstrate significant potential…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Yi Zhang , Lili Xie , Ruihong Qiu , Jiajun Liu , Sen Wang

Human-designed reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL) agents are frequently misaligned with the humans' true, unobservable objectives, and thus act only as proxies. Optimizing for a misspecified proxy reward function often induces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Stephane Hatgis-Kessell , Logan Mondal Bhamidipaty , Emma Brunskill

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective tool for real-world recommender systems with its capacity to model the dynamic interest of users and its interactive nature. Most existing offline RL recommender systems focus on…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Yi Zhang , Ruihong Qiu , Jiajun Liu , Sen Wang

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) bypasses complex reward engineering by learning rewards directly from human preferences, enabling better alignment with human intentions. However, its effectiveness in multi-stage tasks, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yao Luan , Ni Mu , Yiqin Yang , Bo Xu , Qing-Shan Jia

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a general framework concerned with an agent that seeks to maximize rewards in an environment. The learning typically happens through trial and error using explorative methods, such as epsilon-greedy. There are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Per-Arne Andersen , Morten Goodwin , Ole-Christoffer Granmo

We introduce Prompt Curriculum Learning (PCL), a lightweight reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that selects intermediate-difficulty prompts using a learned value model to post-train language models. Since post-training LLMs via RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Zhaolin Gao , Joongwon Kim , Wen Sun , Thorsten Joachims , Sid Wang , Richard Yuanzhe Pang , Liang Tan

Learning to rank (LTR) plays a crucial role in various Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. Although supervised LTR methods based on fine-grained relevance labels (e.g., document-level annotations) have achieved significant success, their…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Yiteng Tu , Zhichao Xu , Tao Yang , Weihang Su , Yujia Zhou , Yiqun Liu , Fen Lin , Qin Liu , Qingyao Ai

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) replaces reward values in traditional reinforcement learning by preferences to better elicit human opinion on the target objective, especially when numerical reward values are hard to design or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Yichong Xu , Ruosong Wang , Lin F. Yang , Aarti Singh , Artur Dubrawski

We introduce Shielded RecRL, a reinforcement learning approach to generate personalized explanations for recommender systems without sacrificing the system's original ranking performance. Unlike prior RLHF-based recommender methods that…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Ansh Tiwari , Ayush Chauhan

Programmatic reinforcement learning (PRL) offers an interpretable alternative to deep reinforcement learning by representing policies as human-readable and -editable programs. While gradient-based methods have been developed to optimize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Chengpeng Hu , Yingqian Zhang , Hendrik Baier

Offline imitation learning (offline IL) enables training effective policies without requiring explicit reward annotations. Recent approaches attempt to estimate rewards for unlabeled datasets using a small set of expert demonstrations.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Shengjie Sun , Jiafei Lyu , Runze Liu , Mengbei Yan , Bo Liu , Deheng Ye , Xiu Li

Reinforcement learning (RL) requires skillful definition and remarkable computational efforts to solve optimization and control problems, which could impair its prospect. Introducing human guidance into reinforcement learning is a promising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-30 Jingda Wu , Zhiyu Huang , Wenhui Huang , Chen Lv

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) optimizes policies for reward but imposes few constraints on how decisions evolve over time. As a result, policies may achieve high performance while exhibiting temporally incoherent behavior such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Sukesh Subaharan

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been effective for post-training autoregressive (AR) language models, but extending these methods to diffusion language models (DLMs) is challenging due to intractable sequence-level likelihoods. Existing…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently been introduced to interactive recommender systems (IRS) because of its nature of learning from dynamic interactions and planning for long-run performance. As IRS is always with thousands of items to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-15 Haokun Chen , Xinyi Dai , Han Cai , Weinan Zhang , Xuejian Wang , Ruiming Tang , Yuzhou Zhang , Yong Yu

Explainable recommendation systems (RSs) are designed to explicitly uncover the rationale of each recommendation, thereby enhancing the transparency and credibility of RSs. Previous methods often jointly predicted ratings and generated…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Xiangchen Pan , Wei Wei

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Yijun Pan , Weikang Qiu , Qiyao Ma , Mingxuan Ju , Tong Zhao , Neil Shah , Rex Ying

Preference based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) removes the need to hand specify a reward function by learning a reward from preference feedback over policy behaviors. Current approaches to PbRL do not address the credit assignment problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Mudit Verma , Katherine Metcalf

Training large language models with reinforcement learning (RL) against verifiable rewards significantly enhances their reasoning abilities, yet remains computationally expensive due to inefficient uniform prompt sampling. We introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Ruiqi Zhang , Daman Arora , Song Mei , Andrea Zanette

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a general framework for adaptive control, which has proven to be efficient in many domains, e.g., board games, video games or autonomous vehicles. In such problems, an agent faces a sequential decision-making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Olivier Buffet , Olivier Pietquin , Paul Weng