Reinforcement Learning

Also known as RL

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Overview

Reinforcement learning studies how an agent can choose actions over time to earn rewards, using experience to improve its decisions. Common approaches include value-based methods such as Q-learning, policy-gradient methods such as PPO, and model-based methods that learn or use a model of the environment; offline and hierarchical methods address learning from fixed data and long tasks. Applications range from Atari and MuJoCo benchmarks to robot control, traffic, games, and language-model agents that use tools or solve multi-step problems. A central challenge is making learning efficient and reliable when rewards are sparse or imperfect, environments change, and success in simulation or benchmarks may not transfer safely to deployment.

Latest papers

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1,743 papers237 papers in the last four weeks, up 46% on the four weeks before. 1.4% of all new papers.

  1. Physics Informed Reinforcement Learning with Gibbs Priors for Topology Control in Power Grids

    Apr 2, 2026Pantelis Dogoulis, Maxime CordyRL ControlReinforcement Learning

    SerVal, SnT, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg

  2. DeltaMem: Towards Agentic Memory Management via Reinforcement Learning

    Apr 2, 2026Qi Zhang, Shen Huang, Chu Liu +4Agent Memory ManagementAgent Memory

    Alibaba Tongyi Lab, Hangzhou, China · Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

  3. Belief-State RWKV for Reinforcement Learning under Partial Observability

    Apr 1, 2026Liu XiaoReinforcement LearningPartially Observable RL

  4. Malliavin Calculus for Counterfactual Gradient Estimation in Adaptive Inverse Reinforcement Learning

    Apr 1, 2026Vikram Krishnamurthy, Luke SnowReinforcement LearningCounterfactual Learning

    School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA

  5. Planning for Change: Reinforcement Learning Combined with Bounded Extremum Seeking for Robotic Control under Distribution Shift

    Apr 1, 2026Shaifalee Saxena, Rafael Fierro, Alexander ScheinkerRobotic ControlReinforcement Learning

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87106, USA · Los Alamos National Lab, Los Alamos, NM 87547, USA

  6. Learning to Hint for Reinforcement Learning

    Apr 1, 2026Yu Xia, Canwen Xu, Zhewei Yao +2Reinforcement LearningRL for Language Model Reasoning

    University of California, San Diego · Snowflake AI Research

  7. Full-Gradient Successor Feature Representations

    Apr 1, 2026Ritish Shrirao, Aditya Priyadarshi, Raghuram Bharadwaj DiddigiReinforcement LearningSuccessor Representations

    Dept. of CSE, IIIT Bangalore · Dept. of DSAI, IIIT Bangalore

  8. GUIDE: Reinforcement Learning for Behavioral Action Support in Type 1 Diabetes

    Apr 1, 2026Saman Khamesian, Sri Harini Balaji, Di Yang Shi +5Reinforcement LearningType 1 Diabetes

    College of Health Solutions, Arizona State University, Phoenix, USA · School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University, Tempe, USA · School for Engineering of Matter Transport and Energy, Arizona State University, Tempe, USA +2

  9. Autonomous Adaptive Solver Selection for Chemistry Integration via Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 31, 2026Eloghosa Ikponmwoba, Opeoluwa OwoyeleReinforcement LearningConstrained RL

    Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Louisiana State University Baton Rouge, LA 70803

  10. Hierarchical Apprenticeship Learning from Imperfect Demonstrations with Evolving Rewards

    Mar 31, 2026Md Mirajul Islam, Rajesh Debnath, Adittya Soukarjya Saha +1Learning from Suboptimal DemonstrationsLearning from Demonstration

    North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27606, USA

  11. Offline Constrained RLHF with Multiple Preference Oracles

    Mar 31, 2026Brenden Latham, Mehrdad MoharramiConstrained RLReinforcement Learning

    Computer Science Department, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA

  12. Evolution Strategies for Deep RL pretraining

    Mar 31, 2026Adrian Martínez, Ananya Gupta, Hanka Goralija +3Reinforcement LearningEvolution Strategies

    École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

  13. SP-GCRL: Influence Maximization on Incomplete Social Graphs

    Mar 31, 2026Haohua Niu, Yuxuan Yang, Lingfeng Zhang +4Influence MaximizationSocial Network Analysis

    School of Systems Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China · School of Finance, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, Jiangxi, China · Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China +1

  14. Target-Aligned Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 31, 2026Leonard S. Pleiss, James Harrison, Maximilian SchifferReinforcement LearningRL Control

    Google DeepMind

  15. AP-DRL: A Synergistic Algorithm-Hardware Framework for Automatic Task Partitioning of Deep Reinforcement Learning on Versal ACAP

    Mar 31, 2026Enlai Li, Zhe Lin, Sharad Sinha +1Reinforcement LearningHeterogeneous Computing

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China · Sun Yat-Sen Univeristy, Guangdong, China · Indian Institute of Technology Goa, Goa, India

  16. Generalizable Dense Reward for Long-Horizon Robotic Tasks

    Mar 31, 2026Silong Yong, Stephen Sheng, Carl Qi +6Reinforcement LearningLong-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

    Carnegie Mellon University · Amazon Robotics · UT Austin

  17. ARCS: Autoregressive Circuit Synthesis with Topology-Aware Graph Attention and Spec Conditioning

    Mar 30, 2026Tushar Dhananjay PathakElectronic Design AutomationAutoregressive Generation

    New York University

  18. COvolve: Adversarial Co-Evolution of Large-Language-Model-Generated Policies and Environments via Two-Player Zero-Sum Game

    Mar 30, 2026Alkis Sygkounas, Rishi Hazra, Andreas Persson +2Lifelong Learning AgentsSelf-Evolving Agents

    Machine Perception and Interaction Lab, Örebro University, Sweden

  19. A Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Closed-loop Guidance of Fish Schools via Virtual Agents

    Mar 30, 2026Takato Shibayama, Hiroaki KawashimaFeedback ControlReinforcement Learning

    Graduate School of Information Science, University of Hyogo, Kobe, Japan

  20. SARL: Label-Free Reinforcement Learning by Rewarding Reasoning Topology

    Mar 30, 2026Yifan Wang, Bolian Li, David Cho +3RL for Language Model ReasoningReinforcement Learning

    Purdue University · Texas Instruments

  21. Near-Optimal Primal-Dual Algorithm for Learning Linear Mixture CMDPs with Adversarial Rewards

    Mar 29, 2026Kihyun Yu, Seoungbin Bae, Dabeen LeeAdversarial MARLReinforcement Learning

    Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, KAIST · Department of Mathematical Sciences, Seoul National University · Research Institute of Mathematics, Seoul National University +2

  22. Optimizing Coverage and Difficulty in Reinforcement Learning for Quiz Composition

    Mar 29, 2026Ricardo Pedro Querido Andrade Silva, Nassim Bouarour, Dina Fettache +3Reinforcement Learning

    CNRS, Univ. Grenoble Alpes Grenoble, France · Université Grenoble Alpes Grenoble, France

  23. FlowRL: A Taxonomy and Modular Framework for Reinforcement Learning with Diffusion Policies

    Mar 29, 2026Chenxiao Gao, Edward Chen, Tianyi Chen +1Flow-Based Policy LearningDiffusion Policy

    Georgia Institute of Technology

  24. Agent-Driven Autonomous Reinforcement Learning Research: Iterative Policy Improvement for Quadruped Locomotion

    Mar 28, 2026Nimesh Khandelwal, Shakti S. GuptaReinforcement LearningRobotic RL

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, India

  25. Prediction-Based Markov Violation Scores for Detecting Non-Markovian Observations in Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 28, 2026Naveen MysoreReinforcement LearningNon-Markovian RL

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

  26. D-SPEAR: Dual-Stream Prioritized Experience Adaptive Replay for Stable Reinforcement Learning in Robotic Manipulation

    Mar 28, 2026Yu Zhang, Karl MasonPrioritized Experience ReplayReinforcement Learning

    School of Computer Science University of Galway Galway, Ireland

  27. HiFlow: Tokenization-Free Scale-Wise Autoregressive Policy Learning via Flow Matching

    Mar 28, 2026Daichi Yashima, Koki Seno, Shuhei Kurita +2Visuomotor Policy LearningFlow-Based Policy Learning

    Keio University · National Institute of Informatics Research and Development Center for Large Language Models · National Institute of Informatics

  28. Factorization Regret mediates compositional generalization in latent space

    Mar 28, 2026John SchwarczGeneralization in RLCompositional Representation Learning

    Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences (ELSC), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

  29. Online Statistical Inference of Constant Sample-averaged Q-Learning

    Mar 27, 2026Saunak Kumar Panda, Tong Li, Ruiqi Liu +1Reinforcement LearningQ-Learning

    Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Houston · Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Texas Tech University

  30. Topology-Aware Graph Reinforcement Learning for Energy Storage Systems Optimal Dispatch in Distribution Networks

    Mar 27, 2026Shuyi Gao, Stavros Orfanoudakis, Shengren Hou +2Power SystemsRL Control

    Department of Electrical Sustainable Energy, Delft University of Technology, Mekelweg 4, Delft, 2628 CD, The Netherlands · Beijing Energy Quant Ltd., Haidian, Beijing, 53100, China