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What is Reinforcement Learning?

Definition

Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a machine learning training paradigm where an agent learns to make decisions by performing actions in an environment to maximize cumulative rewards. The agent learns through trial-and-error feedback.

Why It Matters for AI Builders

Helps AI builders design and scale robust architectures; mastering the implementation of Reinforcement Learning improves latency, accuracy, and operational efficiency for robotics control, game-playing ai (alphago), and autonomous system navigation.

Detailed Deep Dive

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a machine learning paradigm where an agent learns to make decisions by performing actions in an environment to maximize cumulative rewards. Through trial-and-error interaction, the agent receives positive or negative feedback, updating its policy parameters to learn complex control and optimization strategies.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Q:What is the agent-environment loop in RL?

The agent observes the environment state, chooses an action, receives a reward or penalty, and transitions the environment to a new state.

Q:What is the difference between supervised learning and RL?

Supervised learning trains on correct answers. RL trains on feedback (rewards or penalties) without direct labels.

Quick Facts

  • CategoryModel Training
  • Key ApplicationRobotics control, game-playing AI (AlphaGo), and autonomous system navigation

Coverage Trend12 Weeks

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Cite This Term

Reference this definition in your articles, research, or documentation to credit this source:

[Reinforcement Learning | SPIDITS Glossary](https://spidits.com/ai-glossary/reinforcement-learning)

Reinforcement Learning Media Coverage & Intelligence

arXiv AISep 3, 2026

PGPO: Potential-Guided Policy Optimization for Multi-Turn Agentic Tasks

Group-based reinforcement learning (RL) has become an effective paradigm for LLM post-training, but in multi-turn agentic tasks with sparse terminal rewards...

arXiv AIAug 21, 2026

Learning Hierarchical Skill Policies with Offline Quality-Diversity Reinforcement Learning

Recent studies investigate how to leverage pre-collected dataset to improve the policy performance and sample efficiency of RL. One promising approach to...

PRODUCT LAUNCHJul 2, 2026

Best Practices for Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning in Amazon SageMaker AI

In this post, we share best practices for reliable multi-turn RL training.

RESEARCHJun 5, 2026

AgentJet: A Flexible Swarm Training Framework for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

We present AgentJet, a distributed swarm training framework for large language model (LLM) agent reinforcement l