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. Don't Tell the Answer, Truly Guide the Reasoning During RL Rollouts

    Oct 10, 2025Xinyi Wang, Jinyi Han, Zishang Jiang +7Reinforcement LearningRL for Language Model Reasoning

    School of Data Science, Fudan University · 2Shanghai Institute of Artificial Intelligence for Education, East China Normal University · College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University +1

  2. SCOPE-RL: Stable and Quantitative Control of Policy Entropy in RL Post-Training

    Oct 9, 2025Chen Wang, Zhaochun Li, Jionghao Bai +4Reinforcement LearningRL Post-Training

    College of Software, Nankai University · Zhongguancun Academy · Beijing Institute of Technology +2

  3. The Alignment Auditor: A Bayesian Framework for Verifying and Refining LLM Objectives

    Oct 7, 2025Matthieu Bou, Nyal Patel, Arjun Jagota +2Reinforcement LearningLLM Auditing

    1Imperial College London · 2Amazon AGI

  4. Octax: Accelerated CHIP-8 Arcade Environments for Reinforcement Learning in JAX

    Oct 2, 2025Waris Radji, Thomas Michel, Hector PiteauRL BenchmarksReinforcement Learning

    Univ. Lille, Inria, CNRS, Centrale Lille, UMR 9189-CRIStAL, France · Independent Researcher

  5. Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable yet Noisy Rewards under Imperfect Verifiers

    Oct 1, 2025Xin-Qiang Cai, Wei Wang, Feng Liu +3Reinforcement LearningRL for Language Model Reasoning

    RIKEN AIP, Tokyo, Japan · The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan · The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

  6. Clip-Low Increases Entropy and Clip-High Decreases Entropy in Reinforcement Learning of Large Language Models

    Sep 30, 2025Jaesung R. Park, Junsu Kim, Gyeongman Kim +4RL for Language ModelsReinforcement Learning

    Department of Mathematics, UCLA · Department of Mathematical Sciences, Seoul National University · KRAFTON +2

  7. Learning Robust Penetration Testing Policies under Partial Observability: A systematic evaluation

    Sep 24, 2025Raphael Simon, Pieter Libin, Wim MeesReinforcement LearningPartially Observable RL

    Cyber Defence Lab, CISS Department Royal Military Academy · AI Lab, Department of Computer Science Vrije Universiteit Brussel

  8. Frictional Q-Learning

    Sep 24, 2025Hyunwoo Kim, Hyo Kyung LeeReinforcement LearningQ-Learning

    Data Analysis and Healthcare System Lab, Korea University, Seoul, Korea.

  9. Tackling GNARLy Problems: Graph Neural Algorithmic Reasoning Reimagined through Reinforcement Learning

    Sep 23, 2025Alex Schutz, Victor-Alexandru Darvariu, Efimia Panagiotaki +2Graph Neural NetworksReinforcement Learning

    Oxford Robotics Institute, University of Oxford · Stateful Robotics

  10. ICR-RL: Deep Reinforcement Learning via In-Context Regression

    Sep 14, 2025David Schiff, Ofir Lindenbaum, Yonathan EfroniReinforcement LearningIn-Context Learning

    Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel · Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

  11. Reward function compression facilitates goal-dependent reinforcement learning

    Sep 8, 2025Gaia Molinaro, Anne G. E. CollinsReinforcement LearningGoal-Conditioned RL

    University of California, Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94704

  12. Single Agent Robust Deep Reinforcement Learning for Bus Fleet Control

    Aug 28, 2025Yifan Zhang, Liang Zheng, Qifan ZhangReinforcement LearningIntelligent Transportation Systems

    Central South University

  13. Learning Acrobatic Flight from Preferences

    Aug 26, 2025Colin Merk, Ismail Geles, Jiaxu Xing +3RL for RoboticsAerial Robotics

    Robotics and Perception Group, University of Zurich, Switzerland · Autonomous Learning and Predictive Intelligence Lab, University of Zurich, Switzerland

  14. Hybrid Sequence Modeling and Reinforced Verification for Controllable Target-Conditioned Decision Making

    Aug 22, 2025Yue Pei, Hongming Zhang, Chao Gao +7Reinforcement LearningOffline RL

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University, Beijing, China · Department of Computing Science and Amii, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada · Edmonton Research Center, Huawei Canada, Edmonton, Canada +2

  15. Distributionally Robust Markov Games with Average Reward

    Aug 5, 2025Zachary Roch, Yue WangNash Equilibrium ComputationMulti-Agent System Optimization

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

  16. CUDA-L1: Improving CUDA Optimization via Contrastive Reinforcement Learning

    Jul 18, 2025Xiaoya Li, Albert Wang, Guoyin Wang +2Reinforcement LearningGPU Kernel Optimization

    DeepReinforce Team

  17. Illuminating the Three Dogmas of Reinforcement Learning under Evolutionary Light

    Jul 15, 2025Mani Hamidi, Terrence W. DeaconOpen-Ended EvolutionReinforcement Learning

    Department of Computer Science, University of Tübingen, Germany · Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, USA

  18. AsyncFlow: An Asynchronous Streaming RL Framework for Efficient LLM Post-Training

    Jul 2, 2025Zhenyu Han, Ansheng You, Haibo Wang +16RL for Language ModelsAsynchronous RL

    Huawei · Individual Researcher

  19. Policy Improvement with Style-Specific Demonstrations

    Jun 20, 2025Lingfeng Li, Yunlong Lu, Yongyi Wang +1Reinforcement LearningGame-Playing Agents

    School of Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

  20. Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Unobservable Random Delays

    Jun 17, 2025John Wikman, Alexandre Proutiere, David BromanReinforcement LearningRobotic RL

    EECS and Digital Futures, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.

  21. Shared Modular Recurrence in Contextual MDPs for Universal Morphology Control

    Jun 10, 2025Laurens Engwegen, Max Weltevrede, Caroline Horsch +2Robotic ControlReinforcement Learning

    Delft University of Technology Delft, The Netherlands

  22. Efficient Q-Learning and Actor-Critic Methods for Robust Average-Reward Reinforcement Learning

    Jun 8, 2025Yang Xu, Swetha Ganesh, Vaneet AggarwalRobust Markov Decision ProcessesReinforcement Learning

    Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA 47907

  23. Ensemble Elastic DQN: A Step Dependent Ensemble Approach for Reducing Overestimation in Deep Value-Based Reinforcement Learning

    Jun 6, 2025Adrian Ly, Richard Dazeley, Peter Vamplew +2Reinforcement LearningDeep Q-Learning

  24. MAGIK: Mapping to Analogous Goals via Imagination-enabled Knowledge Transfer

    Jun 2, 2025Ajsal Shereef Palattuparambil, Thommen George Karimpanal, Santu RanaReinforcement LearningTransfer Learning

    Applied Artificial Intelligence Initiative, Deakin University · School of IT, Deakin University

  25. Agentic Episodic Control

    Jun 2, 2025Xidong Yang, Wenhao Li, Junjie Sheng +4Agentic RLReinforcement Learning

    East China Normal University · Tongji University · Shanghai Jiao Tong University +2

  26. Normalizing Flows are Capable Models for Continuous Control

    May 29, 2025Raj Ghugare, Benjamin EysenbachNormalizing FlowsReinforcement Learning

    Department of Computer Science Princeton University

  27. Model-Free Robust Average-Reward Reinforcement Learning with Sample Complexity Analysis

    May 18, 2025Zachary Roch, George Atia, Yue WangReinforcement LearningAverage-Reward RL

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

  28. Rule-based and reinforcement-learning policies for resource allocation in a pediatric echo lab: a simulation study

    May 17, 2025Bozhi Sun, Seda Tierney, Jeffrey A. Feinstein +3Online Resource AllocationHealthcare

    Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA. · Department of Pediatrics (Cardiology), Stanford University, CA 94305, US. · Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University, CA 94305, US.

  29. Adaptive Resolving Methods for Markov Decision Processes with Function Approximations

    May 17, 2025Jiashuo Jiang, Yinyu Ye, Yiming ZongMarkov Decision ProcessesReinforcement Learning

    Department of Industrial Engineering & Decision Analytics, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Department of Management Science & Engineering, Stanford University

  30. Towards More Efficient, Robust, Instance-adaptive, and Generalizable Sequential Decision making

    Apr 12, 2025Zhiyong WangMulti-Armed BanditsReinforcement Learning

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong