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Reinforcement learning (RL) relies heavily on exploration to learn from its environment and maximize observed rewards. Therefore, it is essential to design a reward function that guarantees optimal learning from the received experience.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Ingy ElSayed-Aly , Lu Feng

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), how to design a suitable reward signal to accelerate learning and stabilize convergence is a critical problem. The global reward signal assigns the same global reward to all agents…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-03-10 Hangyu Mao , Zhibo Gong , Zhen Xiao

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

We present a simple, sample-efficient algorithm for introducing large but directed learning steps in reinforcement learning (RL), through the use of evolutionary operators. The methodology uses a population of RL agents training with a…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-05-15 Harshad Khadilkar

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a machine learning approach that trains agents to maximize cumulative rewards through interactions with environments. The integration of RL with deep learning has recently resulted in impressive achievements…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Hui Bai , Ran Cheng , Yaochu Jin

Decentralized combinatorial optimization in evolving multi-agent systems poses significant challenges, requiring agents to balance long-term decision-making, short-term optimized collective outcomes, while preserving autonomy of interactive…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Chuhao Qin , Evangelos Pournaras

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging control tasks. However, these methods typically struggle with achieving effective exploration and are extremely sensitive to the choice of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Shauharda Khadka , Somdeb Majumdar , Tarek Nassar , Zach Dwiel , Evren Tumer , Santiago Miret , Yinyin Liu , Kagan Tumer

In tabular multi-agent reinforcement learning with average-cost criterion, a team of agents sequentially interacts with the environment and observes local incentives. We focus on the case that the global reward is a sum of local rewards,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-26 Alec Koppel , Amrit Singh Bedi , Bhargav Ganguly , Vaneet Aggarwal

There is a growing interest in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) as the first steps towards building general intelligent agents that learn to make low and high-level decisions in non-stationary complex environments in the presence…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Marco Jerome Gasparrini , Ricard Solé , Martí Sánchez-Fibla

Inferring reward functions from demonstrations and pairwise preferences are auspicious approaches for aligning Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents with human intentions. However, state-of-the art methods typically focus on learning a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Markus Peschl , Arkady Zgonnikov , Frans A. Oliehoek , Luciano C. Siebert

In this paper, we study the cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) problems using Reward Machines (RMs) to specify the reward functions such that the prior knowledge of high-level events in a task can be leveraged to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Xuejing Zheng , Chao Yu

Solving tasks with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in reinforcement learning. In the single-agent setting, this challenge is addressed by introducing intrinsic rewards that motivate agents to explore unseen regions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) methods allow for learning scalable multi-agent policies, but suffer from partial observability and induced non-stationarity. These challenges can be addressed by introducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Tommaso Marzi , Cesare Alippi , Andrea Cini

Sparse rewards are a major bottleneck in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where simultaneous learning induces non-stationarity and makes reward design especially delicate. Reward shaping can accelerate learning, but in the…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Elie Abboud , Oren Gal

We consider the problem of robust multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) for cooperative communication and coordination tasks. MARL agents, mainly those trained in a centralized way, can be brittle because they can adopt policies that…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-12-16 T. van der Heiden , C. Salge , E. Gavves , H. van Hoof

Recently, evolutionary reinforcement learning has obtained much attention in various domains. Maintaining a population of actors, evolutionary reinforcement learning utilises the collected experiences to improve the behaviour policy through…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Chengpeng Hu , Jialin Liu , Xin Yao

In this paper, we study cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) where the joint reward exhibits submodularity, which is a natural property capturing diminishing marginal returns when adding agents to a team. Unlike standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Wenjing Chen , Chengyuan Qian , Shuo Xing , Yi Zhou , Victoria Crawford

Inferring reward functions from demonstrations is a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in multi-agent RL (MARL), where large joint state-action spaces and complex inter-agent interactions complicate the task. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 The Viet Bui , Tien Mai , Hong Thanh Nguyen

Multi-agent systems are trained to maximize shared cost objectives, which typically reflect system-level efficiency. However, in the resource-constrained environments of mobility and transportation systems, efficiency may be achieved at the…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Jasmine Jerry Aloor , Siddharth Nayak , Sydney Dolan , Hamsa Balakrishnan

Multi-agent hierarchical reinforcement learning (MAHRL) has been studied as an effective means to solve intelligent decision problems in complex and large-scale environments. However, most current MAHRL algorithms follow the traditional way…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Chanjuan Liu , Jinmiao Cong , Bingcai Chen , Yaochu Jin , Enqiang Zhu