AI Glossary

Reinforcement learning

Also called RL

Training in which a system learns by trial and error: it takes actions in an environment, receives rewards or penalties, and adjusts to earn more reward over time.

See also

  • Reinforcement learning from human feedback

    A training method in which people rank a model's answers, a separate reward model learns to predict their preferences, and the main model is then tuned with reinforcement learning toward the answers people prefer.

  • Reward hacking

    When a model trained with rewards finds a way to score well that its designers did not intend, such as gaming a test instead of solving the task.

  • Reasoning model

    A model trained to work through a problem in steps before it answers, spending more test-time compute on problems such as math, coding and analysis.

Source: Google, Machine Learning Glossary: reinforcement learning (RL) (opens in a new tab)

Cite this term.

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This term

Orbyt Labs, Reinforcement learning (AI Glossary), Oct 18, 2026. https://www.orbytlabs.ai/orbyt-collective/glossary/reinforcement-learning

The dataset (JSON)

Orbyt Labs Glossaries (Oct 19, 2026), https://www.orbytlabs.ai/glossary#dataset

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