AI Glossary Term
What does “Reinforcement Learning” mean?
Definition
Training by reward signals where an agent learns actions that maximize long-term return.
How Reinforcement Learning works
Example
A program learns to play a video game by trying moves and receiving points for success. Over millions of games it discovers strategies that earn higher scores, without anyone telling it the rules in advance.
Why it matters
Reinforcement learning is used for game playing, robotics, and fine-tuning language models. Poorly designed rewards can lead to unwanted shortcuts.
Common questions
RL vs supervised learning?
Supervised learning learns from correct answers. RL learns from rewards received after taking actions.
What is reward hacking?
When an agent finds a way to get a high reward without doing what designers intended.
Where is RL used?
Games such as Go, robot control, resource scheduling, and preference tuning of chatbots.