This is the pre-proceedings for the RLC 2026. You may expect minor changes.
Reinforcement Learning Journal, vol. 7, 2026, pp. TBD.
Will be presented at the Reinforcement Learning Conference (RLC), Montréal, Quebec, Canada, August 15–17, 2026.
Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Reward Design, Agent, Alignment, Robotics.
Reinforcement learning has enabled the acquisition of impressive robotic skills, but typically requires hand-crafted reward functions that are slow to design and difficult to align with human intentions. Recent work, such as Eureka, automates reward design by using an LLM to iteratively generate and refine reward code from task descriptions. However, they rely on coarse feedback signals such as success rate, which provide little semantic insight into the learned behavior. As a result, their trained policies achieve the final goal but are frequently poorly aligned with task instructions. We introduce the Reward Design Agent (RDA), a VLM-based agentic framework that injects semantic understanding into reward design. RDA decomposes tasks, visually evaluates trajectories, summarizes failure modes, and iteratively revises reward code to better align with task instructions. Across 12 tabletop manipulation tasks from ManiSkill and 4 whole-body manipulation tasks from HumanoidBench, RDA produces policies substantially more instruction-aligned than those of other baselines, while achieving comparable task success rates. Videos and generated reward code are available on our [project page](https://nitinkamra1992.github.io/reward-design-agent).
Hojoon Lee, Ajay Subramanian, Ben Abbatematteo, Vijay Veerabadran, Pedro Matias, Karl Ridgeway, and Nitin Kamra. "Reward Design Agent for Reinforcement Learning." Reinforcement Learning Journal, vol. 7, 2026, pp. TBD.
BibTeX:@article{lee2026reward,
title={Reward Design Agent for Reinforcement Learning},
author={Hojoon Lee and Ajay Subramanian and Ben Abbatematteo and Vijay Veerabadran and Pedro Matias and Karl Ridgeway and Nitin Kamra},
journal={Reinforcement Learning Journal},
volume={7},
pages={},
year={2026}
}