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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

Specifying rewards for reinforcement learned (RL) agents is challenging. Preference-based RL (PbRL) mitigates these challenges by inferring a reward from feedback over sets of trajectories. However, the effectiveness of PbRL is limited by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Mudit Verma , Katherine Metcalf

Offline preference-based reinforcement learning (RL), which focuses on optimizing policies using human preferences between pairs of trajectory segments selected from an offline dataset, has emerged as a practical avenue for RL applications.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Chen-Xiao Gao , Shengjun Fang , Chenjun Xiao , Yang Yu , Zongzhang Zhang

Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning (AIRL) has shown promise in addressing the sparse reward problem in reinforcement learning (RL) by inferring dense reward functions from expert demonstrations. However, its performance in highly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Bram Silue , Santiago Amaya-Corredor , Patrick Mannion , Lander Willem , Pieter Libin

Agents can base decisions made using reinforcement learning (RL) on a reward function. The selection of values for the learning algorithm parameters can, nevertheless, have a substantial impact on the overall learning process. In order to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Adarsh Sehgal , Nicholas Ward , Hung Manh La , Christos Papachristos , Sushil Louis

Reward engineering and designing an incentive reward function are non-trivial tasks to train agents in complex environments. Furthermore, an inaccurate reward function may lead to a biased behaviour which is far from an efficient and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-05-04 Saeed Tafazzol , Erfan Fathi , Mahdi Rezaei , Ehsan Asali

We study the problem of online multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in environments with sparse rewards, where reward feedback is not provided at each interaction but only revealed at the end of a trajectory. This setting, though…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 The Viet Bui , Tien Mai , Hong Thanh Nguyen

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems typically optimize scalar reward functions that assume precise and reliable evaluation of outcomes. However, real-world objectives--especially those derived from human preferences--are often uncertain,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Disha Singha

We study interactive learning in a setting where the agent has to generate a response (e.g., an action or trajectory) given a context and an instruction. In contrast, to typical approaches that train the system using reward or expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Dipendra Misra , Aldo Pacchiano , Robert E. Schapire

We introduce a class of learning problems where the agent is presented with a series of tasks. Intuitively, if there is relation among those tasks, then the information gained during execution of one task has value for the execution of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-09-06 Christos Dimitrakakis

In the search for more sample-efficient reinforcement-learning (RL) algorithms, a promising direction is to leverage as much external off-policy data as possible. For instance, expert demonstrations. In the past, multiple ideas have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Jesus Bujalance Martin , Fabien Moutarde

Language model (LM) agents deployed in novel environments often exhibit poor sample efficiency when learning from sequential interactions. This significantly hinders the usefulness of such agents in environments where interaction is costly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Michael Y. Hu , Benjamin Van Durme , Jacob Andreas , Harsh Jhamtani

To overcome the sparse reward challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) for agents based on large language models (LLMs), we propose Mutual Information Self-Evaluation (MISE), an RL paradigm that utilizes hindsight generative self-evaluation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Jiashu Yao , Heyan Huang , Zeming Liu , Yuhang Guo

Conventional video summarization approaches based on reinforcement learning have the problem that the reward can only be received after the whole summary is generated. Such kind of reward is sparse and it makes reinforcement learning hard…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Yiyan Chen , Li Tao , Xueting Wang , Toshihiko Yamasaki

Preference optimization has emerged as an efficient alternative to online reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for aligning text-to-image diffusion models. However, existing methods largely reduce supervision to binary pairwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Austin Wang , Jiaqi Han , Stefano Ermon , Yisong Yue

Reinforcement learning can train LLM agents from sparse task rewards, but long-horizon credit assignment remains challenging: a single success-or-failure signal must be distributed across many actions. Existing methods rely on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Xiaozhe Li , Tianyi Lyu , Yang Li , Yichuan Ma , Peiji Li , Linyang Li , Qipeng Guo , Dahua Lin , Kai Chen

Inferential decision-making algorithms typically assume that an underlying probabilistic model of decision alternatives and outcomes may be learned a priori or online. Furthermore, when applied to robots in real-world settings they often…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-09-15 Yucheng Chen , Pingping Zhu , Anthony Alers , Tobias Egner , Marc A. Sommer , Silvia Ferrari

Multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) is commonly considered to suffer from non-stationary environments and exponentially increasing policy space. It would be even more challenging when rewards are sparse and delayed over long…

Sample-efficient online reinforcement learning often uses replay buffers to store experience for reuse when updating the value function. However, uniform replay is inefficient, since certain classes of transitions can be more relevant to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Renhao Wang , Kevin Frans , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine , Alexei A. Efros

Reinforcement learning (RL) enables agents to take decision based on a reward function. However, in the process of learning, the choice of values for learning algorithm parameters can significantly impact the overall learning process. In…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-05-13 Adarsh Sehgal , Hung Manh La , Sushil J. Louis , Hai Nguyen