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Zhang-Wei Hong

24 accepted papers

2026

A Reward-Free Viewpoint on Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2026poster

Many sequential decision-making tasks involve optimizing multiple conflicting objectives, requiring policies that adapt to different user preferences. In multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL), one widely studied approach addresses this by training a single policy network conditioned on prefe…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Composition-Grounded Instruction Synthesis for Visual Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Pretrained multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong performance on diverse multimodal tasks, but remain limited in reasoning capabilities for domains where annotations are difficult to collect. In this work, we focus on artificial image domains such as charts, rendered documents,…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Discovering Hierarchical Software Engineering Agents via Bandit Optimization

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to software engineering (SWE), but they struggle on real-world tasks that are long-horizon and often out of distribution. Current systems typically adopt monolithic designs where a single model attempts to interpret ambiguous issues, navigate lar…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Pushing Forward Pareto Frontiers of Proactive Agents with Behavioral Agentic Optimization

ICML 2026poster

Proactive large language model (LLM) agents aim to actively plan, query, and interact over multiple turns, enabling efficient task completion beyond passive instruction following and making them essential for real-world, user-centric applications. Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) has recently eme…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

ORSO: Accelerating Reward Design via Online Reward Selection and Policy Optimization

ICLR 2025poster

Reward shaping is critical in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly for complex tasks where sparse rewards can hinder learning. However, choosing effective shaping rewards from a set of reward functions in a computationally efficient manner remains an open challenge. We propose Online Reward Sel…

2025

RL Tango: Reinforcing Generator and Verifier Together for Language Reasoning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a compelling approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), where an LLM generator serves as a policy guided by a verifier (reward model). However, current RL post-training methods for LLMs typically use verifier…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

ReGen: Generative Robot Simulation via Inverse Design

ICLR 2025poster

Simulation plays a key role in scaling robot learning and validating policies, but constructing simulations remains labor-intensive. In this paper, we introduce ReGen, a generative simulation framework that automates this process using inverse design. Given an agent's behavior (such as a motion traj…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Satori: Reinforcement Learning with Chain-of-Action-Thought Enhances LLM Reasoning via Autoregressive Search

ICML 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities across diverse domains. Recent studies have shown that increasing test-time computation enhances LLMs' reasoning capabilities. This typically involves extensive sampling at inference time guided by an external LLM verif…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Curiosity-driven Red-teaming for Large Language Models

ICLR 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) hold great potential for many natural language applications but risk generating incorrect or toxic content. To probe when an LLM generates unwanted content, the current paradigm is to recruit a $\textit{red team}$ of human testers to design input prompts (i.e., test case…

2024

Going Beyond Heuristics by Imposing Policy Improvement as a Constraint

NeurIPS 2024poster

In many reinforcement learning (RL) applications, incorporating heuristic rewards alongside the task reward is crucial for achieving desirable performance. Heuristics encode prior human knowledge about how a task should be done, providing valuable hints for RL algorithms. However, such hints may not…

2024

Maximizing Quadruped Velocity by Minimizing Energy

ICRA 2024poster

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been a powerful tool for training robots to acquire agile locomotion skills. To learn locomotion, it is commonly necessary to introduce additional reward-shaping terms, such as an energy minimization term, to guide an algorithm like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO)…

Cited by 5SourceScholar
2024

Random Latent Exploration for Deep Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2024poster

The ability to efficiently explore high-dimensional state spaces is essential for the practical success of deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). This paper introduces a new exploration technique called Random Latent Exploration (RLE), that combines the strengths of exploration bonuses and randomized val…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Text-to-Drive: Diverse Driving Behavior Synthesis via Large Language Models

IROS 2024poster

Generating varied scenarios through simulation is crucial for training and evaluating safety-critical systems, such as autonomous vehicles. Yet, the task of modeling the trajectories of other vehicles to simulate diverse and meaningful close interactions remains prohibitively costly. Adopting langua…

Cited by 6SourceScholar
2023

Beyond Uniform Sampling: Offline Reinforcement Learning with Imbalanced Datasets

NeurIPS 2023poster

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables learning a decision-making policy without interaction with the environment. This makes it particularly beneficial in situations where such interactions are costly. However, a known challenge for offline RL algorithms is the distributional mismatch between…

2023

Harnessing Mixed Offline Reinforcement Learning Datasets via Trajectory Weighting

ICLR 2023poster

Most offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms return a target policy maximizing a trade-off between (1) the expected performance gain over the behavior policy that collected the dataset, and (2) the risk stemming from the out-of-distribution-ness of the induced state-action occupancy. It follo…

2023

Parallel $Q$-Learning: Scaling Off-policy Reinforcement Learning under Massively Parallel Simulation

ICML 2023poster

Reinforcement learning is time-consuming for complex tasks due to the need for large amounts of training data. Recent advances in GPU-based simulation, such as Isaac Gym, have sped up data collection thousands of times on a commodity GPU. Most prior works have used on-policy methods like PPO due to…

2023

TGRL: An Algorithm for Teacher Guided Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2023poster

We consider solving sequential decision-making problems in the scenario where the agent has access to two supervision sources: $\textit{reward signal}$ and a $\textit{teacher}$ that can be queried to obtain a $\textit{good}$ action for any state encountered by the agent. Learning solely from rewards…

Cited by 18SourcePDFScholar
2022

Redeeming intrinsic rewards via constrained optimization

NeurIPS 2022accept

State-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically use random sampling (e.g., $\epsilon$-greedy) for exploration, but this method fails on hard exploration tasks like Montezuma's Revenge. To address the challenge of exploration, prior works incentivize exploration by rewarding the age…

2022

Stubborn: A Strong Baseline for Indoor Object Navigation

IROS 2022poster

We present a strong baseline that surpasses the performance of previously published methods on the Habitat Challenge task of navigating to a target object in indoor environments. Our method is motivated from primary failure modes of prior state-of-the-art: poor exploration, inaccurate object identif…

Cited by 47SourcecodeScholar
2021

Reducing the Deployment-Time Inference Control Costs of Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents via an Asymmetric Architecture

ICRA 2021poster

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been demonstrated to provide promising results in several challenging decision making and control tasks. However, the required inference costs of deep neural networks (DNNs) could prevent DRL from being applied to mobile robots which cannot afford high energy-co…

Cited by 2SourceScholar
2019

Adversarial Active Exploration for Inverse Dynamics Model Learning

CoRL 2019

We present an adversarial active exploration for inverse dynamics model learning, a simple yet effective learning scheme that incentivizes exploration in an environment without any human intervention. Our framework consists of a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agent and an inverse dynamics model c

2018

Diversity-Driven Exploration Strategy for Deep Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2018poster

Efficient exploration remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning, especially when an environment contains large state spaces, deceptive local optima, or sparse rewards. To tackle this problem, we present a diversity-driven approach for exploration, which can be easily combined…