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Discovering Reinforcement Learning Interfaces with Large Language Models

arXiv 2605.03408 ↗First posted 5 May 2026cs.LG cs.AIcited by 0

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Abstract (arXiv)

Reinforcement learning systems rely on environment interfaces that specify observations and reward functions, yet constructing these interfaces for new tasks often requires substantial manual effort. While recent work has automated reward design using large language models (LLMs), these approaches assume fixed observations and do not address the broader challenge of synthesizing complete task interfaces. We study RL task interface discovery from raw simulator state, where both observation mappings and reward functions must be generated. We propose LIMEN (Code available at https://github.com/Lossfunk/LIMEN), a LLM guided evolutionary framework that produces candidate interfaces as executable programs and iteratively refines them using policy training feedback. Across novel discrete gridworld tasks and continuous control domains spanning locomotion and manipulation, joint evolution of observations and rewards discovers effective interfaces given only a trajectory-level success metric, while optimizing either component alone fails on at least one domain. These results demonstrate that automatic construction of RL interfaces from raw state can substantially reduce manual engineering and that observation and reward components often benefit from co-design, as single-component optimization fails catastrophically on at least one domain in our evaluation suite.

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References · 20

  1. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 14,441
  2. 2021Program Synthesis with Large Language Modelscited by 3,509
  3. 2025AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discoverycited by 763
  4. 2023Eureka: Human-Level Reward Design via Coding Large Language Modelscited by 542
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  8. 2021Brax -- A Differentiable Physics Engine for Large Scale Rigid Body Simulationcited by 375
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  10. 2023A Survey of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedbackcited by 259
  11. 2023EvoPrompting: Language Models for Code-Level Neural Architecture Searchcited by 129
  12. 2024DrEureka: Language Model Guided Sim-To-Real Transfercited by 78
8 more
  1. 2023XLand-MiniGrid: Scalable Meta-Reinforcement Learning Environments in JAXcited by 54
  2. 2018CEM-RL: Combining evolutionary and gradient-based methods for policy searchcited by 53
  3. 2024LLM-Empowered State Representation for Reinforcement Learningcited by 28
  4. 2023Semantic HELM: A Human-Readable Memory for Reinforcement Learningcited by 17
  5. 2024SEABO: A Simple Search-Based Method for Offline Imitation Learningcited by 14
  6. 2022ERL-Re2: Efficient Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning with Shared State Representation and Individual Policy Representationcited by 11
  7. 2023PEARL: Zero-shot Cross-task Preference Alignment and Robust Reward Learning for Robotic Manipulationcited by 9
  8. 2025LERO: LLM-driven Evolutionary framework with Hybrid Rewards and Enhanced Observation for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learningcited by 9

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