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. KAGE-Bench: Fast Known-Axis Visual Generalization Evaluation for Reinforcement Learning

    Jan 20, 2026Egor Cherepanov, Daniil Zelezetsky, Alexey K. Kovalev +1RL BenchmarksReinforcement Learning

    1AXXX, Moscow, Russia · 2MIRAI, Moscow, Russia

  2. Reinforcement Learning with Multi-Step Lookahead Information Via Adaptive Batching

    Jan 15, 2026Nadav MerlisReinforcement LearningRegret Minimization in RL

    The Faculty of Data and Decision Sciences, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Israel

  3. MemBuilder: Reinforcing LLMs for Long-Term Memory Construction via Attributed Dense Rewards

    Jan 9, 2026Zhiyu Shen, Ziming Wu, Fuming Lai +2Reinforcement LearningMemory-Augmented Language Models

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China · Tencent Inc.

  4. RL-AWB: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Auto White Balance Correction in Low-Light Night-time Scenes

    Jan 8, 2026Yuan-Kang Lee, Kuan-Lin Chen, Chia-Che Chang +1Image EnhancementReinforcement Learning

    MediaTek Inc., Taiwan · National Taiwan University, Taiwan · National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan

  5. Survival Dynamics of Neural and Programmatic Policies in Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning

    Jan 7, 2026Anton Roupassov-Ruiz, Yiyang ZuoReinforcement LearningArtificial Life

    Department of Computing Science University of Alberta Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2E8, Canada

  6. Soft Fitted Q-Iteration without Bellman Completeness: Occupancy Reweighting and Temperature Annealing

    Dec 30, 2025Lars van der Laan, Nathan KallusReinforcement LearningKL-Regularized RL

    Department of Statistics, University of Washington · Netflix · Cornell University

  7. Trust Region Masking for Long-Horizon LLM Reinforcement Learning

    Dec 28, 2025Yingru Li, Jiacai Liu, Jiawei Xu +4RL for Language ModelsReinforcement Learning

    Fudan University · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen

  8. Meta-RL with Bayesian Linear Task Models

    Dec 24, 2025Jingyang You, Hanna KurniawatiRepresentation LearningReinforcement Learning

    School of Computing Australian National University

  9. The HydroGym Reinforcement Learning Platform for Fluid Dynamics

    Dec 19, 2025Christian Lagemann, Sajeda Mokbel, Miro Gondrum +18RL ControlRL Benchmarks

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, United States · AI Institute in Dynamic Systems, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, United States · Chair of Fluid Mechanics and Institute of Aerodynamics, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany +9

  10. Adaptive Partitioning and Learning for Stochastic Control of Diffusion Processes

    Dec 17, 2025Hanqing Jin, Renyuan Xu, Yanzhao YangRL ControlReinforcement Learning

    Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford · Department of Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University

  11. Dual-Evolving Reinforcement Learning for Automated Reward Design

    Dec 15, 2025Sitao Cheng, Tianle Li, Xuhan Huang +2Reward Design for RLReinforcement Learning

    University of Waterloo · The University of Hong Kong · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen +1

  12. Symmetry-Aware Steering of Equivariant Diffusion Policies: Benefits and Limits

    Dec 12, 2025Minwoo Park, Junwoo Chang, Jongeun Choi +1Diffusion PolicyRL for Diffusion Models

    Yonsei University, Seoul 03722, Republic of Korea · University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

  13. UBCL: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Controllable and Diverse Player Behaviors

    Dec 11, 2025Atahan Cilan, Atay ÖzgövdeReinforcement LearningHuman Behavior Simulation

    Turkish Aerospace, Istanbul, Turkey · Department of Computer Engineering, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey

  14. Achieving Olympiad-Level Geometry Large Language Model Agent via Complexity Boosting Reinforcement Learning

    Dec 11, 2025Haiteng Zhao, Junhao Shen, Yiming Zhang +7LLM AgentsReinforcement Learning

    1Shanghai AI Laboratory · 2Shanghai Jiao Tong University · 3Peking University +2

  15. Statistical analysis of Inverse Entropy-regularized Reinforcement Learning

    Dec 7, 2025Denis Belomestny, Alexey Naumov, Artemy Rubtsov +1Reward ModelingReinforcement Learning

  16. CUDA-L2: Surpassing cuBLAS Performance for Matrix Multiplication through Reinforcement Learning

    Dec 2, 2025Songqiao Su, Xiaoya Li, Albert Wang +3Reinforcement LearningGPU Kernel Optimization

    DeepReinforce Team

  17. Iterative Policy Optimization: Batch-Online Multi-Turn RL via Single-Turn RL

    Nov 26, 2025Daniel R. Jiang, Ankur Samanta, Yukai Yang +3Reinforcement LearningPolicy Iteration

    Meta · Columbia University · FAIR at Meta

  18. Attention Trajectories as a Diagnostic Axis for Deep Reinforcement Learning

    Nov 25, 2025Charlotte Beylier, Hannah Selder, Arthur Fleig +2Reinforcement LearningInterpretability in RL

    Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences · Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (ScaDS.AI) Dresden/Leipzig · Leipzig, Germany +2

  19. Reinforcement Learning to Initialize Newton-Raphson for AC Power Flow with Quantum Annealing-Based Environment Updates

    Nov 25, 2025Zeynab Kaseb, Matthias Moller, Lindsay Spoor +4Reinforcement LearningQuantum Annealing

    Electrical Sustainable Energy, Delft University of Technology, P.O. Box 5031, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands. · Applied Mathematics, Delft University of Technology, P.O. Box 5031, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands. · Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University, P.O. Box 9512, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands. +3

  20. PepEVOLVE: Position-Aware Dynamic Peptide Optimization via Group-Relative Advantage

    Nov 21, 2025Trieu Nguyen, Hao-Wei Pang, Shasha FengMolecular OptimizationDrug Discovery

    Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA · University of South Florida, FL, USA

  21. Humanoid Whole-Body Badminton via an Annealed Reinforcement Learning Curriculum

    Nov 14, 2025Chenhao Liu, Leyun Jiang, Ningyuan Tian +4RL for RoboticsReinforcement Learning

  22. SpatialThinker: Reinforcing Scene Graph-Grounded Spatial Reasoning via Dense Rewards

    Nov 10, 2025Hunar Batra, Haoqin Tu, Hardy Chen +3Multimodal UnderstandingScene Graph Generation

    University of Oxford · University of California, Santa Cruz

  23. Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Unordered Tasks: From Boolean to Coupled Reward Machines

    Oct 31, 2025Kristina Levina, Nikolaos Pappas, Athanasios Karapantelakis +2Reinforcement LearningQ-Learning

    Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden · Ericsson Research, Stockholm, Sweden

  24. A Game-Theoretic Spatio-Temporal Reinforcement Learning Framework for Collaborative Public Resource Allocation

    Oct 30, 2025Songxin Lei, Qiongyan Wang, Yanchen Zhu +6Multi-Agent CoordinationReinforcement Learning

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Peking University · Beijing Institute of Technology +1

  25. Zero-Human Demonstration End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Trajectory Scorer

    Oct 28, 2025Zhenxin Li, Nadine Chang, Wenhao Yao +9Long-Tail Autonomous DrivingReinforcement Learning

    Institute of Trustworthy Embodied AI, Fudan University · *Work done during an internship at NVIDIA. · NVIDIA +3

  26. Learning to Reason Efficiently with Discounted Reinforcement Learning

    Oct 27, 2025Alex Ayoub, Kavosh Asadi, Dale Schuurmans +2Reinforcement LearningRL for Language Model Reasoning

    Amazon, University of Alberta · Amazon · University of Alberta

  27. Toward Agents That Reason About Their Computation

    Oct 26, 2025Adrian Orenstein, Jessica Jiajing Chen, Gwyneth Anne Delos Santos +2Reinforcement LearningGame-Playing Agents

    Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, Canada · Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) · Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada +1

  28. On the Hardness of Reinforcement Learning with Transition Look-Ahead

    Oct 22, 2025Corentin Pla, Hugo Richard, Marc Abeille +2Reinforcement LearningModel-Based Planning

    CREST, ENSAE · Criteo AI Lab · FairPlay Joint Team +1

  29. Consistent Zero-Shot Imitation with Contrastive Goal Inference

    Oct 20, 2025Kathryn Wantlin, Chongyi Zheng, Benjamin EysenbachContrastive LearningReinforcement Learning

    Department of Computer Science, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.

  30. Pretraining in Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning for Locomotion

    Oct 14, 2025Jiale Fan, Andrei Cramariuc, Tifanny Portela +1RL for RoboticsReinforcement Learning

    Section of Microengineering, EPFL, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland · Robotic Systems Lab, ETH Zurich, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland · ETH AI Center, ETH Zurich, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland