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Many continuous control problems can be formulated as sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. In principle, online RL methods can automatically explore the state space to solve each new task. However, discovering sequences of…

Episodic tasks in Reinforcement Learning (RL) often pose challenges due to sparse reward signals and high-dimensional state spaces, which hinder efficient learning. Additionally, these tasks often feature hidden "trap states" --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Yuxuan Li , Yicheng Gao , Ning Yang , Stephen Xia

Since the earliest days of reinforcement learning, the workhorse method for assigning credit to actions over time has been temporal-difference (TD) learning, which propagates credit backward timestep-by-timestep. This approach suffers when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-25 David Raposo , Sam Ritter , Adam Santoro , Greg Wayne , Theophane Weber , Matt Botvinick , Hado van Hasselt , Francis Song

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can learn complex policies to optimize agent operation over time. RL algorithms have shown promising results in solving complicated problems in recent years. However, their application on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-29 Hamed Khorasgani , Haiyan Wang , Chetan Gupta , Susumu Serita

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) has proven to be a successful framework for leveraging experience from prior tasks to rapidly learn new related tasks, however, current meta-RL approaches struggle to learn in sparse reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-12-03 Charles Packer , Pieter Abbeel , Joseph E. Gonzalez

Rewards play an essential role in reinforcement learning. In contrast to rule-based game environments with well-defined reward functions, complex real-world robotic applications, such as contact-rich manipulation, lack explicit and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-30 Yuning Wu , Jieliang Luo , Hui Li

Although Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been popular in many disciplines including robotics, state-of-the-art DRL algorithms still struggle to learn long-horizon, multi-step and sparse reward tasks, such as stacking several blocks…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-10 Xintong Yang , Ze Ji , Jing Wu , Yu-kun Lai

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently proven great success in various domains. Yet, the design of the reward function requires detailed domain expertise and tedious fine-tuning to ensure that agents are able to learn the desired…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Murad Dawood , Nils Dengler , Jorge de Heuvel , Maren Bennewitz

Reinforcement learning (RL) depends critically on the choice of reward functions used to capture the de- sired behavior and constraints of a robot. Usually, these are handcrafted by a expert designer and represent heuristics for relatively…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-03-03 Xiao Li , Cristian-Ioan Vasile , Calin Belta

Learning from Demonstrations (LfD) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) have enabled robot agents to accomplish complex tasks. Reward Machines (RMs) enhance RL's capability to train policies over extended time horizons by structuring high-level…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Mattijs Baert , Sam Leroux , Pieter Simoens

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…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown its strength in challenging sequential decision-making problems. The reward function in RL is crucial to the learning performance, as it serves as a measure of the task completion degree. In real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Siyuan Li , Shijie Han , Yingnan Zhao , By Liang , Peng Liu

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

We study policy evaluation problems in multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) under a low-rank representation setting. In this setting, we are given $N$ learning tasks where the corresponding value function of these tasks lie in an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Yitao Bai , Sihan Zeng , Justin Romberg , Thinh T. Doan

In reinforcement learning (RL), the consideration of multivariate reward signals has led to fundamental advancements in multi-objective decision-making, transfer learning, and representation learning. This work introduces the first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Harley Wiltzer , Jesse Farebrother , Arthur Gretton , Mark Rowland

Multi-task representation learning (MTRL) is an approach that learns shared latent representations across related tasks, facilitating collaborative learning that improves the overall learning efficiency. This paper studies MTRL for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yaoze Guo , Shana Moothedath

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

We draw upon a previously largely untapped literature on human collective intelligence as a source of inspiration for improving deep learning. Implicit in many algorithms that attempt to solve Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) tasks is the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-02-18 Dhaval Adjodah , Dan Calacci , Yan Leng , Peter Krafft , Esteban Moro , Alex Pentland

Long-term temporal credit assignment is an important challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). It refers to the ability of the agent to attribute actions to consequences that may occur after a long time interval. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Tanmay Gangwani , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng