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The challenge of developing powerful and general Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents has received increasing attention in recent years. Much of this effort has focused on the single-agent setting, in which an agent maximizes a predefined…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-21 Jiachen Yang , Ang Li , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Peter Sunehag , Edward Hughes , Hongyuan Zha

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to behave so as to maximise the sum of a suitable scalar function of state: the reward. These rewards are typically given and immutable. In this paper, we instead consider the proposition…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Zeyu Zheng , Junhyuk Oh , Matteo Hessel , Zhongwen Xu , Manuel Kroiss , Hado van Hasselt , David Silver , Satinder Singh

Training a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) model with a sparse reward is generally difficult because numerous combinations of interactions among agents induce a certain outcome (i.e., success or failure). Earlier studies have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Heechang Ryu , Hayong Shin , Jinkyoo Park

In the last few years, the research activity around reinforcement learning tasks formulated over environments with sparse rewards has been especially notable. Among the numerous approaches proposed to deal with these hard exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

Efficient exploration in deep cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) still remains challenging in complex coordination problems. In this paper, we introduce a novel Episodic Multi-agent reinforcement learning with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Lulu Zheng , Jiarui Chen , Jianhao Wang , Jiamin He , Yujing Hu , Yingfeng Chen , Changjie Fan , Yang Gao , Chongjie Zhang

Imitation learning is an effective alternative approach to learn a policy when the reward function is sparse. In this paper, we consider a challenging setting where an agent and an expert use different actions from each other. We assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Konrad Zolna , Negar Rostamzadeh , Yoshua Bengio , Sungjin Ahn , Pedro O. Pinheiro

Many real-world multiagent learning problems involve safety concerns. In these setups, typical safe reinforcement learning algorithms constrain agents' behavior, limiting exploration -- a crucial component for discovering effective…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Ayhan Alp Aydeniz , Enrico Marchesini , Robert Loftin , Christopher Amato , Kagan Tumer

For groups of autonomous agents to achieve a particular goal, they must engage in coordination and long-horizon reasoning. However, designing reward functions to elicit such behavior is challenging. In this paper, we study how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Chirayu Nimonkar , Shlok Shah , Catherine Ji , Benjamin Eysenbach

In multi-agent reinforcement learning, discovering successful collective behaviors is challenging as it requires exploring a joint action space that grows exponentially with the number of agents. While the tractability of independent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-10 Julien Roy , Paul Barde , Félix G. Harvey , Derek Nowrouzezahrai , Christopher Pal

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) requires agents to discover joint strategies in a combinatorially large state-action space, yet effective coordination configurations are exceedingly rare. Intrinsic motivation, which…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Dahyun Oh , Minhyuk Yoon , H. Jin Kim

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

Collaborative multi-agent exploration of unknown environments is crucial for search and rescue operations. Effective real-world deployment must address challenges such as limited inter-agent communication and static and dynamic obstacles.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Gabriele Calzolari , Vidya Sumathy , Christoforos Kanellakis , George Nikolakopoulos

Reinforcement learning for embodied agents is a challenging problem. The accumulated reward to be optimized is often a very rugged function, and gradient methods are impaired by many local optimizers. We demonstrate, in an experimental…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-06-01 Guido Montufar , Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi , Nihat Ay

Autonomous exploration in complex multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) with sparse rewards critically depends on providing agents with effective intrinsic motivation. While artificial curiosity offers a powerful self-supervised signal,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yiyuan Pan , Zhe Liu , Hesheng Wang

Learning optimal policies in sparse rewards settings is difficult as the learning agent has little to no feedback on the quality of its actions. In these situations, a good strategy is to focus on exploration, hopefully leading to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Giuseppe Paolo , Miranda Coninx , Alban Laflaquière , Stephane Doncieux

Efficient exploration remains one of the longstanding problems of deep reinforcement learning. Instead of depending solely on extrinsic rewards from the environments, existing methods use intrinsic rewards to enhance exploration. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-09 SuMin Oh , WanSoo Kim , HyunJin Kim

In this study, we address the problem of efficient exploration in reinforcement learning. Most common exploration approaches depend on random action selection, however these approaches do not work well in environments with sparse or no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-30 Doğay Kamar , Nazım Kemal Üre , Gözde Ünal

Efficient collaboration in the centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) paradigm remains a challenge in cooperative multi-agent systems. We identify divergent action tendencies among agents as a significant obstacle to…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-08-30 Junkai Zhang , Yifan Zhang , Xi Sheryl Zhang , Yifan Zang , Jian Cheng

Learning in environments with sparse rewards remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning. Artificial curiosity addresses this limitation through intrinsic rewards to guide exploration, however, the precise formulation of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Alexander Nedergaard , Pablo A. Morales

Many cooperative multiagent reinforcement learning environments provide agents with a sparse team-based reward, as well as a dense agent-specific reward that incentivizes learning basic skills. Training policies solely on the team-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Shauharda Khadka , Somdeb Majumdar , Santiago Miret , Stephen McAleer , Kagan Tumer