Yuxi Li
We start with a brief introduction to reinforcement learning (RL), about its successful stories, basics, an example, issues, the ICML 2019 Workshop on RL for Real Life, how to use it, study material and an outlook. Then we discuss a selection of RL applications, including recommender systems, computer systems, energy, finance, healthcare, robotics, and transportation.
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The advent of large pre-trained generative language models has provided a common framework for AI story generation via sampling the model to create sequences that continue the story. However, sampling alone is insufficient for story generation. In particular, it is hard to direct a language model to create stories to reach a specific goal event. We present two automated techniques grounded in deep reinforcement learning and reward shaping to control the plot of computer-generated stories. The first utilizes proximal policy optimization to fine-tune an existing transformer-based language model …
In recent years, \emph{search story}, a combined display with other organic channels, has become a major source of user traffic on platforms such as e-commerce search platforms, news feed platforms and web and image search platforms. The recommended search story guides a user to identify her own preference and personal intent, which subsequently influences the user's real-time and long-term search behavior. %With such an increased importance of search stories, As search stories become increasingly important, in this work, we study the problem of personalized search story recommendation within …
Stories or narratives are comprised of a sequence of events. To compose interesting stories, professional writers often leverage a creative writing technique called flashback that inserts past events into current storylines as we commonly observe in novels and plays. However, it is challenging for machines to generate flashback as it requires a solid understanding of event temporal order (e.g. "feeling hungry" before "eat," not vice versa), and the creativity to arrange storylines so that earlier events do not always appear first in narrative order. Two major issues in existing systems that ex…
Reward design for reinforcement learning agents can be difficult in situations where one not only wants the agent to achieve some effect in the world but where one also cares about how that effect is achieved. For example, we might wish for an agent to adhere to a tacit understanding of commonsense, align itself to a preference for how to behave for purposes of safety, or taking on a particular role in an interactive game. Storytelling is a mode for communicating tacit procedural knowledge. We introduce a technique, Story Shaping, in which a reinforcement learning agent infers tacit knowledge …
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is considered a potential framework to improve many real-world autonomous systems; it has attracted the attention of multiple and diverse fields. Nevertheless, the successful deployment in the real world is a test most of DRL models still need to pass. In this work we focus on this issue by reviewing and evaluating the research efforts from both domain-agnostic and domain-specific communities. On one hand, we offer a comprehensive summary of DRL challenges and summarize the different proposals to mitigate them; this helps identifying five gaps of domain-agnost…
The reinforcement learning research area contains a wide range of methods for solving the problems of intelligent agent control. Despite the progress that has been made, the task of creating a highly autonomous agent is still a significant challenge. One potential solution to this problem is intrinsic motivation, a concept derived from developmental psychology. This review considers the existing methods for determining intrinsic motivation based on the world model obtained by the agent. We propose a systematic approach to current research in this field, which consists of three categories of me…
Due to the realization that deep reinforcement learning algorithms trained on high-dimensional tasks can strongly overfit to their training environments, there have been several studies that investigated the generalization performance of these algorithms. However, there has been no similar study that evaluated the generalization performance of algorithms that were specifically designed for generalization, i.e. meta-reinforcement learning algorithms. In this paper, we assess the generalization performance of these algorithms by leveraging high-dimensional, procedurally generated environments. W…
Though impressive results have been achieved in visual captioning, the task of generating abstract stories from photo streams is still a little-tapped problem. Different from captions, stories have more expressive language styles and contain many imaginary concepts that do not appear in the images. Thus it poses challenges to behavioral cloning algorithms. Furthermore, due to the limitations of automatic metrics on evaluating story quality, reinforcement learning methods with hand-crafted rewards also face difficulties in gaining an overall performance boost. Therefore, we propose an Adversari…
In this paper we describe Robofriend, a robotic teddy bear for telling stories to young children. Robofriend adapts its behavior to keep the childrens' attention using reinforcement learning.
Owe to the recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence especially deep learning, many data-driven decision support systems have been implemented to facilitate medical doctors in delivering personalized care. We focus on the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) models in this paper. DRL models have demonstrated human-level or even superior performance in the tasks of computer vision and game playings, such as Go and Atari game. However, the adoption of deep reinforcement learning techniques in clinical decision optimization is still rare. We present the first survey that summarizes reinforcemen…
Deep reinforcement learning is poised to revolutionise the field of AI and represents a step towards building autonomous systems with a higher level understanding of the visual world. Currently, deep learning is enabling reinforcement learning to scale to problems that were previously intractable, such as learning to play video games directly from pixels. Deep reinforcement learning algorithms are also applied to robotics, allowing control policies for robots to be learned directly from camera inputs in the real world. In this survey, we begin with an introduction to the general field of reinf…
Emotions and their evolution play a central role in creating a captivating story. In this paper, we present the first study on modeling the emotional trajectory of the protagonist in neural storytelling. We design methods that generate stories that adhere to given story titles and desired emotion arcs for the protagonist. Our models include Emotion Supervision (EmoSup) and two Emotion-Reinforced (EmoRL) models. The EmoRL models use special rewards designed to regularize the story generation process through reinforcement learning. Our automatic and manual evaluations demonstrate that these mode…
We propose a hierarchically structured reinforcement learning approach to address the challenges of planning for generating coherent multi-sentence stories for the visual storytelling task. Within our framework, the task of generating a story given a sequence of images is divided across a two-level hierarchical decoder. The high-level decoder constructs a plan by generating a semantic concept (i.e., topic) for each image in sequence. The low-level decoder generates a sentence for each image using a semantic compositional network, which effectively grounds the sentence generation conditioned on…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the three basic paradigms of machine learning. It has demonstrated impressive performance in many complex tasks like Go and StarCraft, which is increasingly involved in smart manufacturing and autonomous driving. However, RL consistently suffers from the exploration-exploitation dilemma. In this paper, we investigated the problem of improving exploration in RL and introduced the intrinsically-motivated RL. In sharp contrast to the classic exploration strategies, intrinsically-motivated RL utilizes the intrinsic learning motivation to provide sustainable ex…
Financial portfolio management is one of the problems that are most frequently encountered in the investment industry. Nevertheless, it is not widely recognized that both Kelly Criterion and Risk Parity collapse into Mean Variance under some conditions, which implies that a universal solution to the portfolio optimization problem could potentially exist. In fact, the process of sequential computation of optimal component weights that maximize the portfolio's expected return subject to a certain risk budget can be reformulated as a discrete-time Markov Decision Process (MDP) and hence as a stoc…
Training Emergent Joint Associations: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Creative Thinking in Language Models
本文提出了一种基于强化学习的框架，通过增强语言模型的关联性思维能力，提升其在故事创作、代码生成和数据可视化等任务中的原创性和灵活性。
Success stories of applied machine learning can be traced back to the datasets and environments that were put forward as challenges for the community. The challenge that the community sets as a benchmark is usually the challenge that the community eventually solves. The ultimate challenge of reinforcement learning research is to train real agents to operate in the real environment, but until now there has not been a common real-world RL benchmark. In this work, we present a prototype real-world environment from OffWorld Gym -- a collection of real-world environments for reinforcement learning …
Reinforcement Learning with Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: A Brief Survey
本综述探讨了利用知识表示与推理（KRR）方法增强强化学习（RL）的抽象表示与学习效率，以应对泛化、样本效率及安全可解释性挑战，并展望未来研究方向。
In this paper we consider the basic version of Reinforcement Learning (RL) that involves computing optimal data driven (adaptive) policies for Markovian decision process with unknown transition probabilities. We provide a brief survey of the state of the art of the area and we compare the performance of the classic UCB policy of \cc{bkmdp97} with a new policy developed herein which we call MDP-Deterministic Minimum Empirical Divergence (MDP-DMED), and a method based on Posterior sampling (MDP-PS).
Rewarding Creativity: A Human-Aligned Generative Reward Model for Reinforcement Learning in Storytelling
本文提出了一种人类对齐的生成奖励模型和强化学习框架，用于提升故事创作的质量和稳定性。
Retell, Reward, Repeat: Reinforcement Learning for Narrative Theory-Informed Story Retelling
提出RRR强化学习框架，结合结构主义叙事学与标量叙事性，通过d-RLAIF从文本特征中获取训练信号，无需参考输出，提升LLM故事复述的逻辑性、合理性和完整性。
Guided Safe Shooting: model based reinforcement learning with safety constraints
针对强化学习落地现实场景时缺乏安全保障的问题，提出基于模型的GuSS方法，搭配三种安全规划器，可在少违反安全约束、少交互的前提下实现高回报。
Imitation can be viewed as a means of enhancing learning in multiagent environments. It augments an agent's ability to learn useful behaviors by making intelligent use of the knowledge implicit in behaviors demonstrated by cooperative teachers or other more experienced agents. We propose and study a formal model of implicit imitation that can accelerate reinforcement learning dramatically in certain cases. Roughly, by observing a mentor, a reinforcement-learning agent can extract information about its own capabilities in, and the relative value of, unvisited parts of the state space. We study …
This article is a gentle discussion about the field of reinforcement learning in practice, about opportunities and challenges, touching a broad range of topics, with perspectives and without technical details. The article is based on both historical and recent research papers, surveys, tutorials, talks, blogs, books, (panel) discussions, and workshops/conferences. Various groups of readers, like researchers, engineers, students, managers, investors, officers, and people wanting to know more about the field, may find the article interesting. In this article, we first give a brief introduction t…
We propose a model-free deep reinforcement learning method that leverages a small amount of demonstration data to assist a reinforcement learning agent. We apply this approach to robotic manipulation tasks and train end-to-end visuomotor policies that map directly from RGB camera inputs to joint velocities. We demonstrate that our approach can solve a wide variety of visuomotor tasks, for which engineering a scripted controller would be laborious. In experiments, our reinforcement and imitation agent achieves significantly better performances than agents trained with reinforcement learning or …
Although deep reinforcement learning has become a promising machine learning approach for sequential decision-making problems, it is still not mature enough for high-stake domains such as autonomous driving or medical applications. In such contexts, a learned policy needs for instance to be interpretable, so that it can be inspected before any deployment (e.g., for safety and verifiability reasons). This survey provides an overview of various approaches to achieve higher interpretability in reinforcement learning (RL). To that aim, we distinguish interpretability (as a property of a model) and…
A Tutorial Introduction to Reinforcement Learning
本文是一篇强化学习教程导论，以随机逼近为核心主题，系统综述了马尔可夫奖励与决策过程及$Q$-学习等主流算法。
Soft $Q(λ)$: A multi-step off-policy method for entropy regularised reinforcement learning using eligibility traces
本文提出Soft Q(λ)，一种基于效用追踪的离策略方法，通过引入新的Soft Tree Backup操作符，扩展了软Q学习的多步框架，实现了高效的信用分配。
Throughout the cognitive-science literature, there is widespread agreement that decision-making agents operating in the real world do so under limited information-processing capabilities and without access to unbounded cognitive or computational resources. Prior work has drawn inspiration from this fact and leveraged an information-theoretic model of such behaviors or policies as communication channels operating under a bounded rate constraint. Meanwhile, a parallel line of work also capitalizes on the same principles from rate-distortion theory to formalize capacity-limited decision making th…
Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning with Language-Encoded Gated Policy Networks
本文提出词汇策略网络（LEXPOL），利用语言编码和门控机制混合子策略，实现多任务强化学习，在MetaWorld上达到或超越基线，并能组合专家策略适应新任务。
Anderson acceleration is an old and simple method for accelerating the computation of a fixed point. However, as far as we know and quite surprisingly, it has never been applied to dynamic programming or reinforcement learning. In this paper, we explain briefly what Anderson acceleration is and how it can be applied to value iteration, this being supported by preliminary experiments showing a significant speed up of convergence, that we critically discuss. We also discuss how this idea could be applied more generally to (deep) reinforcement learning.
A trustworthy reinforcement learning algorithm should be competent in solving challenging real-world problems, including {robustly} handling uncertainties, satisfying {safety} constraints to avoid catastrophic failures, and {generalizing} to unseen scenarios during deployments. This study aims to overview these main perspectives of trustworthy reinforcement learning considering its intrinsic vulnerabilities on robustness, safety, and generalizability. In particular, we give rigorous formulations, categorize corresponding methodologies, and discuss benchmarks for each perspective. Moreover, we …
RLCard is an open-source toolkit for reinforcement learning research in card games. It supports various card environments with easy-to-use interfaces, including Blackjack, Leduc Hold'em, Texas Hold'em, UNO, Dou Dizhu and Mahjong. The goal of RLCard is to bridge reinforcement learning and imperfect information games, and push forward the research of reinforcement learning in domains with multiple agents, large state and action space, and sparse reward. In this paper, we provide an overview of the key components in RLCard, a discussion of the design principles, a brief introduction of the interf…
A Survey on Offline Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
该综述梳理了离线强化学习与基于模型的强化学习的概念及进展，聚焦二者交叉的离线基于模型强化学习领域，总结现有方法解决分布偏移问题的思路，提出领域挑战与未来研究方向。
A reinforcement learning agent tries to maximize its cumulative payoff by interacting in an unknown environment. It is important for the agent to explore suboptimal actions as well as to pick actions with highest known rewards. Yet, in sensitive domains, collecting more data with exploration is not always possible, but it is important to find a policy with a certain performance guaranty. In this paper, we present a brief survey of methods available in the literature for balancing exploration-exploitation trade off and computing robust solutions from fixed samples in reinforcement learning.
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents in human-computer interactions applications require repeated user interactions before they can perform well. To address this "cold start" problem, we propose a novel approach of using cognitive models to pre-train RL agents before they are applied to real users. After briefly reviewing relevant cognitive models, we present our general methodological approach, followed by two case studies from our previous and ongoing projects. We hope this position paper stimulates conversations between RL, HCI, and cognitive science researchers in order to explore the full p…
As a subfield of machine learning, reinforcement learning (RL) aims at empowering one's capabilities in behavioural decision making by using interaction experience with the world and an evaluative feedback. Unlike traditional supervised learning methods that usually rely on one-shot, exhaustive and supervised reward signals, RL tackles with sequential decision making problems with sampled, evaluative and delayed feedback simultaneously. Such distinctive features make RL technique a suitable candidate for developing powerful solutions in a variety of healthcare domains, where diagnosing decisio…
Semantic HELM: A Human-Readable Memory for Reinforcement Learning
本文提出语义 HELM 记忆机制，利用 CLIP 和预训练语言模型将智能体的过去事件表示为人类可读语言，在需要记忆的部分可观测任务中性能优异，且收敛速度比先前方法快两个数量级，显著提升了可解释性。
We give an overview of recent exciting achievements of deep reinforcement learning (RL). We discuss six core elements, six important mechanisms, and twelve applications. We start with background of machine learning, deep learning and reinforcement learning. Next we discuss core RL elements, including value function, in particular, Deep Q-Network (DQN), policy, reward, model, planning, and exploration. After that, we discuss important mechanisms for RL, including attention and memory, unsupervised learning, transfer learning, multi-agent RL, hierarchical RL, and learning to learn. Then we discu…
This paper provides an analysis of the tradeoff between asymptotic bias (suboptimality with unlimited data) and overfitting (additional suboptimality due to limited data) in the context of reinforcement learning with partial observability. Our theoretical analysis formally characterizes that while potentially increasing the asymptotic bias, a smaller state representation decreases the risk of overfitting. This analysis relies on expressing the quality of a state representation by bounding L1 error terms of the associated belief states. Theoretical results are empirically illustrated when the s…
Detecting and Mitigating the Correct-Answer Extinction Window in Test-Time Reinforcement Learning with Majority Voting
本文提出TTRL-Guard框架，通过翻转率感知奖励缩放、少数保留采样和风险条件稀疏更新三种机制，检测并缓解测试时强化学习中多数投票导致的正确答案信号永久抑制问题。
We discuss deep reinforcement learning in an overview style. We draw a big picture, filled with details. We discuss six core elements, six important mechanisms, and twelve applications, focusing on contemporary work, and in historical contexts. We start with background of artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning (RL), with resources. Next we discuss RL core elements, including value function, policy, reward, model, exploration vs. exploitation, and representation. Then we discuss important mechanisms for RL, including attention and memory, unsupervis…
This is a brief technical note to clarify the state of lower bounds on regret for reinforcement learning. In particular, this paper: - Reproduces a lower bound on regret for reinforcement learning, similar to the result of Theorem 5 in the journal UCRL2 paper (Jaksch et al 2010). - Clarifies that the proposed proof of Theorem 6 in the REGAL paper (Bartlett and Tewari 2009) does not hold using the standard techniques without further work. We suggest that this result should instead be considered a conjecture as it has no rigorous proof. - Suggests that the conjectured lower bound given by (Bartl…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a machine learning paradigm where an autonomous agent learns to make an optimal sequence of decisions by interacting with the underlying environment. The promise demonstrated by RL-guided workflows in unraveling electronic design automation problems has encouraged hardware security researchers to utilize autonomous RL agents in solving domain-specific problems. From the perspective of hardware security, such autonomous agents are appealing as they can generate optimal actions in an unknown adversarial environment. On the other hand, the continued globalization of…
Distributed Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Survey and A Multi-Player Multi-Agent Learning Toolbox
本文综述分布式深度强化学习方法与关键组件，并开发发布一个多玩家多智能体分布式深度强化学习工具箱，在Wargame环境中验证其可用性，同时展望挑战与未来趋势。
CORE: Concept-Oriented Reinforcement for Bridging the Definition-Application Gap in Mathematical Reasoning
CORE通过引入概念导向的强化学习框架，解决大语言模型在数学推理中概念应用不足的问题，通过合成概念对齐习题和注入概念片段提升模型的推理能力。
Addressing a real world sequential decision problem with Reinforcement Learning (RL) usually starts with the use of a simulated environment that mimics real conditions. We present a novel open source RL environment for realistic crop management tasks. gym-DSSAT is a gym interface to the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT), a high fidelity crop simulator. DSSAT has been developped over the last 30 years and is widely recognized by agronomists. gym-DSSAT comes with predefined simulations based on real world maize experiments. The environment is as easy to use as any gym e…
Selective Reincarnation: Offline-to-Online Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
该研究提出多智能体强化学习中的选择性转生范式，验证其在异构协作场景下比从头训练收益更高、比全转生收敛更快，同时指出转生对象选择的关键作用，呼吁推动该方向研究。
Prior access to domain knowledge could significantly improve the performance of a reinforcement learning agent. In particular, it could help agents avoid potentially catastrophic exploratory actions, which would otherwise have to be experienced during learning. In this work, we identify consistently undesirable actions in a set of previously learned tasks, and use pseudo-rewards associated with them to learn a prior policy. In addition to enabling safer exploratory behaviors in subsequent tasks in the domain, we show that these priors are transferable to similar environments, and can be learne…
BRIEF: BRain-Inspired network connection search with Extensive temporal feature Fusion enhances disease classification
本文提出受大脑启发的BRIEF框架，通过改进的神经网络连接搜索和Transformer多特征融合自动优化fMRI精神障碍分类，在SZ和ASD数据集上显著超越21种现有模型。
Selective Perception: Optimizing State Descriptions with Reinforcement Learning for Language Model Actors
针对LLM智能体决策时高维状态描述冗余低效的问题，提出BLINDER方法，通过学习任务条件下的状态描述值函数自动筛选简洁状态描述，在NetHack游戏和机器人操作任务中提升了成功率、降低了成本且可跨LLM泛化。
Enhancing Reinforcement Learning in 3D Environments through Semantic Segmentation: A Case Study in ViZDoom
提出SS-only和RGB+SS两种输入表示，利用语义分割减少内存消耗并提升强化学习在3D环境中的性能，在ViZDoom中验证。
Reinforcement Learning for Quantum Technology
本文探讨了强化学习在量子技术中的应用，包括状态制备、量子门优化和量子电路构建，以及量子反馈控制和纠错等挑战。
Learning global control of underactuated systems with Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
本文提出采用数据高效的MC-PILCO基于模型强化学习算法，为欠驱动的pendubot和acrobot系统学习全局控制策略，并应用于ICRA 2025的AI Olympics竞赛。
Reinforcement Learning with Lie Group Orientations for Robotics
本文针对机器人强化学习中朝向处理的数学正确性问题，提出一种遵循李群结构的网络输入输出修改方法，在多种机器人控制任务中显著优于常见朝向表示。
Space-sampled Value Decay: Forgetting Mechanisms for Non-stationary Reinforcement Learning
受啮齿动物遗忘行为启发，提出空间采样值衰减作为显式遗忘机制，用于深度强化学习应对环境漂移，在DQN和SAC上验证效果与局限。
Meta-learning is a branch of machine learning which aims to synthesize data from a distribution of related tasks to efficiently solve new ones. In process control, many systems have similar and well-understood dynamics, which suggests it is feasible to create a generalizable controller through meta-learning. In this work, we formulate a meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) control strategy that takes advantage of known, offline information for training, such as a model structure. The meta-RL agent is trained over a distribution of model parameters, rather than a single model, enabling the age…
Reinforcement Learning for Sustainable Energy: A Survey
本文综述了强化学习在可持续能源领域的应用，系统梳理了能源生产到消费各环节的决策挑战及其强化学习建模方法，并探讨了多智能体、离线和安全强化学习等核心主题，为该交叉领域提供了广泛概述和未来方向。
In imitation and reinforcement learning, the cost of human supervision limits the amount of data that robots can be trained on. An aspirational goal is to construct self-improving robots: robots that can learn and improve on their own, from autonomous interaction with minimal human supervision or oversight. Such robots could collect and train on much larger datasets, and thus learn more robust and performant policies. While reinforcement learning offers a framework for such autonomous learning via trial-and-error, practical realizations end up requiring extensive human supervision for reward f…
This is a brief technical note to clarify some of the issues with applying the application of the algorithm posterior sampling for reinforcement learning (PSRL) in environments without fixed episodes. In particular, this paper aims to: - Review some of results which have been proven for finite horizon MDPs (Osband et al 2013, 2014a, 2014b, 2016) and also for MDPs with finite ergodic structure (Gopalan et al 2014). - Review similar results for optimistic algorithms in infinite horizon problems (Jaksch et al 2010, Bartlett and Tewari 2009, Abbasi-Yadkori and Szepesvari 2011), with particular att…
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