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Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has shown its promising capabilities to learn optimal policies directly from trial and error. However, learning can be hindered if the goal of the learning, defined by the reward function, is "not optimal".…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-10-09 Yizheng Zhang , Andre Rosendo

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) is a multi-goal reinforcement learning algorithm for sparse reward functions. The algorithm treats every failure as a success for an alternative (virtual) goal that has been achieved in the episode. Virtual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Binyamin Manela , Armin Biess

The potential of reinforcement learning (RL) to deliver aligned and performant agents is partially bottlenecked by the reward engineering problem. One alternative to heuristic trial-and-error is preference-based RL (PbRL), where a reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Tom Bewley , Freddy Lecue

Goal representation affects the performance of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) algorithms by decomposing the complex learning problem into easier subtasks. Recent studies show that representations that preserve temporally abstract…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Mehdi Zadem , Sergio Mover , Sao Mai Nguyen

Despite of achieving great success in real-world applications, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is still suffering from three critical issues, i.e., data efficiency, lack of the interpretability and transferability. Recent research shows…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-07-10 Hankz Hankui Zhuo , Shuting Deng , Mu Jin , Zhihao Ma , Kebing Jin , Chen Chen , Chao Yu

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities in logical reasoning, in-context learning, and code generation. However, translating natural language instructions into effective robotic control policies remains a significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Utsav Singh , Pramit Bhattacharyya , Vinay P. Namboodiri

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) enables agents to solve complex, long-horizon tasks by decomposing them into manageable sub-tasks. However, HRL methods face two fundamental challenges: (i) non-stationarity caused by the evolving…

Exploration strategy design is one of the challenging problems in reinforcement learning~(RL), especially when the environment contains a large state space or sparse rewards. During exploration, the agent tries to discover novel areas or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-07 Xiao Ma , Shen-Yi Zhao , Wu-Jun Li

Many real-world robot learning problems, such as pick-and-place or arriving at a destination, can be seen as a problem of reaching a goal state as soon as possible. These problems, when formulated as episodic reinforcement learning tasks,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-10 Gautham Vasan , Yan Wang , Fahim Shahriar , James Bergstra , Martin Jagersand , A. Rupam Mahmood

Sparse reward is one of the most challenging problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) attempts to address this issue by converting a failed experience to a successful one by relabeling the goals. Despite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-13 Harris Chan , Yuhuai Wu , Jamie Kiros , Sanja Fidler , Jimmy Ba

Adversarial inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) for multi-agent task allocation (MATA) is challenged by non-stationary interactions and high-dimensional coordination. Unconstrained reward inference in these settings often leads to high…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Huilin Yin , Zhikun Yang , Linchuan Zhang , Daniel Watzenig

Reward learning enables robots to learn adaptable behaviors from human input. Traditional methods model the reward as a linear function of hand-crafted features, but that requires specifying all the relevant features a priori, which is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Andreea Bobu , Marius Wiggert , Claire Tomlin , Anca D. Dragan

Reinforcement Learning (RL) with rubric-based rewards has recently shown remarkable progress in enhancing general reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet still suffers from ineffective exploration confined to curent…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Wenjian Zhang , Kongcheng Zhang , Jiaxin Qi , Baisheng Lai , Jianqiang Huang

Dealing with environments with sparse rewards has always been crucial for systems developed to operate in autonomous open-ended learning settings. Intrinsic Motivations could be an effective way to help Deep Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Gianluca Maselli , Vieri Giuliano Santucci

In many sequential decision making tasks, it is challenging to design reward functions that help an RL agent efficiently learn behavior that is considered good by the agent designer. A number of different formulations of the reward-design…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-25 Zeyu Zheng , Junhyuk Oh , Satinder Singh

Exploration with sparse rewards remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Especially for sequential object manipulation tasks, the RL agent always receives negative rewards until completing all sub-tasks, which…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Yongle Luo , Yuxin Wang , Kun Dong , Qiang Zhang , Erkang Cheng , Zhiyong Sun , Bo Song

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) effectively improves agents' exploration efficiency on tasks with sparse reward, with the guide of high-quality hierarchical structures (e.g., subgoals or options). However, how to automatically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Shaohui Peng , Xing Hu , Rui Zhang , Ke Tang , Jiaming Guo , Qi Yi , Ruizhi Chen , Xishan Zhang , Zidong Du , Ling Li , Qi Guo , Yunji Chen

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is computationally challenging, with common approaches requiring the solution of multiple reinforcement learning (RL) sub-problems. This work motivates the use of potential-based reward shaping to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Lauren H. Cooke , Harvey Klyne , Edwin Zhang , Cassidy Laidlaw , Milind Tambe , Finale Doshi-Velez

In the early stages of human life, babies develop their skills by exploring different scenarios motivated by their inherent satisfaction rather than by extrinsic rewards from the environment. This behavior, referred to as intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-25 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser