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

  1. Artificial Intelligence for Climate Adaptation: Reinforcement Learning for Climate Change-Resilient Transport

    Mar 6, 2026Miguel Costa, Arthur Vandervoort, Carolin Schmidt +5Reinforcement Learning

    Department of Technology, Management and Economics, Technical University of Denmark, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark · Present address: School of Management, Technical University of Munich, 80333 Munich, Germany. · Present address: Saint-Gobain Distribution Denmark, 2605 Brøndby, Denmark. +1

  2. Synthetic Monitoring Environments for Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 6, 2026Leonard Pleiss, Carolin Schmidt, Maximilian SchifferRL BenchmarksReinforcement Learning

    Technical University Munich Munich, 80331

  3. Stabilizing Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Language Models

    Mar 6, 2026Jianyuan Zhong, Kaibo Wang, Ding Ding +5RL for Diffusion ModelsReinforcement Learning

    Huawei Foundation Model Department · The Chinese University of Hong Kong · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

  4. Preventing Learning Stagnation in PPO by Scaling to 1 Million Parallel Environments

    Mar 6, 2026Michael Beukman, Khimya Khetarpal, Zeyu Zheng +4Reinforcement LearningProximal Policy Optimization

    FLAIR, University of Oxford · Google DeepMind

  5. Reinforcement Learning for Power-Flow Network Analysis

    Mar 5, 2026Alperen Ergur, Julia Lindberg, Vinny MillerPower SystemsReinforcement Learning

    The University of Texas at San Antonio, Mathematics and Computer Science Departments · Georgia Tech, Mathematics Department · The University of Texas at San Antonio, Computer Science Department

  6. A Novel Hybrid Heuristic-Reinforcement Learning Optimization Approach for a Class of Railcar Shunting Problems

    Mar 5, 2026Ruonan Zhao, Joseph GeunesRL for Combinatorial OptimizationReinforcement Learning

    Wm Michael Barnes ’64 Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Texas A&M University

  7. Wiki-R1: Incentivizing Multimodal Reasoning for Knowledge-based VQA via Data and Sampling Curriculum

    Mar 5, 2026Shan Ning, Longtian Qiu, Xuming HeVisual Question AnsweringReinforcement Learning

    ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, China · Lingang Laboratory, Shanghai, China · Shanghai Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Vision and Imaging

  8. Decoupling Task and Behavior: A Two-Stage Reward Curriculum in Reinforcement Learning for Robotics

    Mar 5, 2026Kilian Freitag, Knut Åkesson, Morteza Haghir ChehreghaniRL for RoboticsReinforcement Learning

    Chalmers University of Technology · Gothenburg University

  9. Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 5, 2026Michal Nauman, Marek Cygan, Pieter AbbeelReinforcement LearningOff-Policy RL

    University of Warsaw · University of Warsaw, Nomagic · UC Berkeley, Amazon FAR

  10. Prism: Policy Reuse via Interpretable Strategy Mapping in Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 4, 2026Thomas PravetzRL for Game AIZero-Shot Policy Transfer

  11. What Does Flow Matching Bring To TD Learning?

    Mar 4, 2026Bhavya Agrawalla, Michal Nauman, Aviral KumarReinforcement LearningValue Function Estimation

    Carnegie Mellon University · University of Warsaw

  12. Unbiased Dynamic Pruning for Efficient Group-Based Policy Optimization

    Mar 4, 2026Haodong Zhu, Yangyang Ren, Yanjing Li +6Reinforcement LearningRL for Language Model Reasoning

    Beihang University · Zhongguancun Academy · Rakuten Singapore +3

  13. BeamPERL: Parameter-Efficient RL with Verifiable Rewards Specializes Compact LLMs for Structured Beam Mechanics Reasoning

    Mar 4, 2026Tarjei Paule Hage, Markus J. BuehlerStructural EngineeringRL for Language Model Reasoning

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Schwarzman College of Computing, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

  14. GIPO: Gaussian Importance Sampling Policy Optimization

    Mar 4, 2026Chengxuan Lu, Zhenquan Zhang, Shukuan Wang +3Reinforcement LearningImportance Sampling for RL

    1IROOTECH TECHNOLOGY · 2Wolf 1069 b Lab, Sany Group

  15. Learning Approximate Nash Equilibria in Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Mean-Field Subsampling

    Mar 4, 2026Emile Anand, Ishani KarmarkarMean-Field MARLReinforcement Learning

    Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA · Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA

  16. Alternating Reinforcement Learning with Contextual Rubric Rewards: Beyond the Scalarization Strategy

    Mar 4, 2026Guangchen Lan, Lian Xiong, Xin Zhou +7Reinforcement LearningRubric-Based RL

    Amazon · University of California, San Diego

  17. Freezing of Gait Prediction using Proactive Agent that Learns from Selected Experience and DDQN Algorithm

    Mar 4, 2026Septian Enggar Sukmana, Sang Won Bae, Tomohiro ShibataPrioritized Experience ReplayParkinson's Disease

    Kyushu Institute of Technology · Graduate School of Life Science and Systems Engineering, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Kitakyushu, Japan · Stevens Institute of Technology +1

  18. Hybrid Belief Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Coordinated Spatial Exploration

    Mar 4, 2026Danish Rizvi, David BoyleUAV CommunicationReinforcement Learning

    Imperial College London, UK

  19. Q-Measure-Learning for Continuous State RL: Efficient Implementation and Convergence

    Mar 3, 2026Shengbo WangReinforcement LearningQ-Learning

    Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Southern California

  20. Minimax Optimal Strategy for Delayed Observations in Online Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 3, 2026Harin Lee, Kevin JamiesonDelayed RLReinforcement Learning

    Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington.

  21. Edit in 2D, Verify in 3D: Reinforcement Learning for Multi-view Consistent Scene Editing

    Mar 3, 2026Jiyuan Wang, Chunyu Lin, Lei Sun +8Multi-View ConsistencyReinforcement Learning

    1BJTU, 2AMap Alibaba Group, 3NTU, 4CQUPT

  22. Reinforcement Learning with Symbolic Reward Machines

    Mar 3, 2026Thomas Krug, Daniel NeiderNon-Markovian RLReinforcement Learning

    TU Dortmund University · Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security

  23. Enhancing User Throughput in Multi-panel mmWave Radio Access Networks for Beam-based MU-MIMO Using a DRL Method

    Mar 3, 2026Ramin Hashemi, Vismika Ranasinghe, Teemu Veijalainen +2Millimeter-Wave CommunicationsWireless Communications

    Nokia, Espoo, Finland · Department of Information and Communications Engineering, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

  24. Real-Time Generative Policy via Langevin-Guided Flow Matching for Autonomous Driving

    Mar 3, 2026Tianze Zhu, Yinuo Wang, Wenjun Zou +6Reinforcement LearningRL for Autonomous Driving

    School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · College of Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

  25. COOL-MC: Verifying and Explaining RL Policies for Platelet Inventory Management

    Mar 2, 2026Dennis GrossInventory ControlReinforcement Learning

  26. Efficient RLVR Training via Weighted Mutual Information Data Selection

    Mar 2, 2026Xinyu Zhou, Boyu Zhu, Haotian Zhang +2Reinforcement LearningRL for Language Model Reasoning

    HKUST(GZ) · UCL · Kuaishou Technology +1

  27. SEAR: Sample Efficient Action Chunking Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 2, 2026C. F. Maximilian Nagy, Onur Celik, Emiliyan Gospodinov +4Reinforcement LearningSample-Efficient RL

    Autonomous Learning Robots, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology · FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik, Karlsruhe

  28. State-Action Inpainting Diffuser for Continuous Control with Delay

    Mar 2, 2026Dongqi Han, Wei Wang, Enze Zhang +1Delayed RLReinforcement Learning

    Microsoft Research Asia · University of Pennsylvania · Shanghai Jiaotong University

  29. GAC: Stabilizing Asynchronous RL Training for LLMs via Gradient Alignment Control

    Mar 2, 2026Haofeng Xu, Junwei Su, Yukun Tian +3RL StabilityAsynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic

    School of Computing and Data Science, The University of Hong Kong · Alibaba Group · Southeast University

  30. LLM-assisted Semantic Option Discovery for Facilitating Adaptive Deep Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 2, 2026Chang Yao, Jinghui Qin, Kebing Jin +1Reinforcement LearningLLM-Guided RL