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

CardsList

1,742 papers237 papers in the last four weeks, up 46% on the four weeks before. 1.4% of all new papers.

  1. From Broad Exploration to Stable Synthesis: Entropy-Guided Optimization for Autoregressive Image Generation

    Mar 12, 2026Han Song, Yucheng Zhou, Jianbing Shen +1Image GenerationAutoregressive Image Generation

    The Chinese University of Hong Kong · University of Macau

  2. Hybrid Energy-Aware Reward Shaping: A Unified Lightweight Physics-Guided Methodology for Policy Optimization

    Mar 12, 2026Qijun Liao, Jue Yang, Yiting Kang +3RL ControlReinforcement Learning

    School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 100083, China · Jiangsu XCMG Construction Machinery Research Institute Co., Ltd., Jiangsu 221000, China

  3. Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Self-Reflection for Agentic Search

    Mar 11, 2026Teng Xiao, Yige Yuan, Hamish Ivison +6Reinforcement LearningAgentic Search

    Allen Institute for AI · University of Washington · Independent

  4. Hindsight-Anchored Policy Optimization: Learning Through Hindsight with Thompson Sampling-Inspired Adaptive Gating

    Mar 11, 2026Yuning Wu, Ke Wang, Haoran Liu +3Reinforcement LearningRL for Language Model Reasoning

    Amazon

  5. Ergodicity in reinforcement learning

    Mar 11, 2026Dominik Baumann, Erfaun Noorani, Arsenii Mustafin +5Reinforcement LearningAverage-Reward RL

    Cyber-physical Systems Group, Aalto University, Espoo 02150, Finland · Control & Autonomous Systems Engineering Group, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington, MA 02421-6426, USA · Data Analytics Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussel 1050, Belgium +2

  6. Learning to Score: Tuning Cluster Schedulers through Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 11, 2026Martin Asenov, Qiwen Deng, Gingfung Yeung +1Learning to OptimizeReinforcement Learning

    Edinburgh Research Centre, Central Software Institute, Huawei · School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews

  7. GeMPO: Generalized Measure Matching for Online Diffusion Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 10, 2026Haitong Ma, Chenxiao Gao, Tianyi Chen +2Reinforcement LearningRL for Diffusion Models

    Harvard University · Georgia Institute of Technology

  8. Actor-Accelerated Policy Dual Averaging for Reinforcement Learning in Continuous Action Spaces

    Mar 10, 2026Ji Gao, Caleb Ju, Guanghui Lan +1Reinforcement LearningPolicy Optimization

    School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, GA, USA. · H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, GA, USA. · H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, GA, USA

  9. OpenClaw-RL: Train Any Agent Simply by Talking

    Mar 10, 2026Yinjie Wang, Xuyang Chen, Xiaolong Jin +2Agentic RLReinforcement Learning

  10. When Learning Rates Go Wrong: Early Structural Signals in PPO Actor-Critic

    Mar 10, 2026Alberto Fernández-Hernández, Cristian Pérez-Corral, Jose I. Mestre +3Reinforcement LearningProximal Policy Optimization

    Universitat Polit`ecnica de Val`encia, Valencia, Spain · Universitat Jaume I, Castell´o de la Plana, Spain · Openchip & Software Technologies, Barcelona, Spain

  11. SPAARS: Safer RL Policy Alignment through Abstract Exploration and Refined Exploitation of Action Space

    Mar 10, 2026Swaminathan S K, Aritra HazraReinforcement LearningOffline-To-Online RL

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kharagpur

  12. MO-Playground: Massively Parallelized Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning for Robotics

    Mar 10, 2026Neil Janwani, Ellen Novoseller, Vernon J. Lawhern +1GPU-Accelerated RLMulti-Objective Reinforcement Learning

    Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA USA · DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, MD, USA

  13. Decoupling Reasoning and Confidence: Resurrecting Calibration in Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards

    Mar 10, 2026Zhengzhao Ma, Xueru Wen, Boxi Cao +6Reinforcement LearningRL for Language Model Reasoning

    Chinese Information Processing Laboratory, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China · Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China +2

  14. A Survey of Reinforcement Learning For Economics

    Mar 9, 2026Pranjal RawatReinforcement Learning

    Georgetown University

  15. Multi-level meta-reinforcement learning with skill-based curriculum

    Mar 9, 2026Sichen Yang, Mauro MaggioniReinforcement LearningHierarchical RL

    Johns Hopkins University · Department of Applied Mathematics & Statistics Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA · Department of Mathematics, Department of Applied Mathematics & Statistics Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA

  16. Embedding Classical Balance Control Principles in Reinforcement Learning for Humanoid Recovery

    Mar 9, 2026Nehar Poddar, Stephen McCrory, Luigi Penco +3Humanoid Robot Fall RecoveryHumanoid Robot Control

    Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Pensacola, FL, USA. · University of West Florida, Pensacola, FL, USA.

  17. Towards Batch-to-Streaming Deep Reinforcement Learning for Continuous Control

    Mar 9, 2026Riccardo De Monte, Matteo Cederle, Gian Antonio SustoReinforcement LearningContinuous Control

    Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova

  18. RetroAgent: From Solving to Evolving via Retrospective Dual Intrinsic Feedback

    Mar 9, 2026Xiaoying Zhang, Zichen Liu, Yipeng Zhang +2Reinforcement LearningRL for LLM Agents

    Shanghai AI Lab · National University of Singapore · Independent Researcher

  19. Impact of Connectivity on Laplacian Representations in Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 9, 2026Tommaso Giorgi, Pierriccardo Olivieri, Keyue Jiang +2Reinforcement LearningRepresentation Learning for RL

    Baker Hughes, Florence, Italy · Politecnico di Milano · University College London, AI Center (UCL) +1

  20. CRED: Counterfactual Reasoning and Environment Design for Active Preference Learning

    Mar 9, 2026Yi-Shiuan Tung, Gyanig Kumar, Wei Jiang +2Active Preference LearningPreference Learning

    Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder

  21. Posterior Sampling Reinforcement Learning with Gaussian Processes for Continuous Control: Sublinear Regret Bounds for Unbounded State Spaces

    Mar 9, 2026Hamish Flynn, Joe Watson, Ingmar Posner +1RL ControlRegret Minimization in RL

    Carnegie Mellon University · University of Oxford · Technical University of Darmstadt +2

  22. RL unknotter, hard unknots and unknotting number

    Mar 9, 2026Anne Dranowski, Yura Kabkov, Daniel TubbenhauerReinforcement Learning

  23. Robust Transfer Learning with Side Information

    Mar 9, 2026Akram S. Awad, Shihab Ahmed, Yue Wang +1Reinforcement LearningRobust Markov Decision Processes

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Central Florida, USA · Department of Computer Science, University of Central Florida, USA

  24. TDM-R1: Reinforcing Few-Step Diffusion Models with Non-Differentiable Reward

    Mar 8, 2026Yihong Luo, Tianyang Hu, Weijian Luo +1RL for Diffusion ModelsReinforcement Learning

    Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen · hi-Lab, Xiaohongshu Inc +1

  25. Helix: Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning for Open-Ended Scientific Problem Solving

    Mar 8, 2026Chang Su, Zhongkai Hao, Zhizhou Zhang +4Evolutionary RLReinforcement Learning

    Bosch (China) Investment Co., Ltd. · Tsinghua-Bosch Joint Center for ML, Tsinghua University · Dept. of Comp. Sci. & Techn., Tsinghua University +1

  26. Re2\textbf{Re}^{2}: Unlocking LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning with Re-solving

    Mar 7, 2026Pinzheng Wang, Shuli Xu, Juntao Li +4RL for Language Model ReasoningReinforcement Learning

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University · Department of Foundation Model, 2012 Labs, Huawei · College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University

  27. Learning From Failures: Efficient Reinforcement Learning Control with Episodic Memory

    Mar 7, 2026Chenyang MiaoReinforcement LearningRL Control

    Xi’an Jiaotong University

  28. Topology-Aware Reinforcement Learning over Graphs for Resilient Power Distribution Networks

    Mar 7, 2026Roshni Anna Jacob, Prithvi Poddar, Jaidev Goel +3Power SystemsReinforcement Learning

    The University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA · University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA · Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

  29. Boosting deep Reinforcement Learning using pretraining with Logical Options

    Mar 6, 2026Zihan Ye, Phil Chau, Raban Emunds +5Neuro-Symbolic RLReinforcement Learning

    CS Department, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany · AIML Group · Hessian AI +2

  30. A Reference Architecture of Reinforcement Learning Frameworks

    Mar 6, 2026Xiaoran Liu, Istvan DavidReinforcement Learning

    McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada · McMaster Centre for Software Certification, Hamilton, Canada