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In standard reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to optimize the overall reward. However, many key aspects of a desired behavior are more naturally expressed as constraints. For instance, the designer may want to limit the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Kianté Brantley , Hal Daumé , Miroslav Dudik , Robert Schapire

Exploration in environments with continuous control and sparse rewards remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, surprise has been used as an intrinsic reward that encourages systematic and efficient exploration. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-01 Haitao Xu , Brendan McCane , Lech Szymanski

One of the challenges in applying reinforcement learning in a complex real-world environment lies in providing the agent with a sufficiently detailed reward function. Any misalignment between the reward and the desired behavior can result…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Neta Glazer , Aviv Navon , Aviv Shamsian , Ethan Fetaya

Many real-world systems problems require reasoning about the long term consequences of actions taken to configure and manage the system. These problems with delayed and often sequentially aggregated reward, are often inherently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-06 Ameer Haj-Ali , Nesreen K. Ahmed , Ted Willke , Joseph Gonzalez , Krste Asanovic , Ion Stoica

While reinforcement learning (RL) has been successful in natural language processing (NLP) domains such as dialogue generation and text-based games, it typically faces the problem of sparse rewards that leads to slow or no convergence.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Ameet Deshpande , Eve Fleisig

The last few years have seen an explosion of interest in autonomous cyber defence agents based on deep reinforcement learning. Such agents are typically trained in a cyber gym environment, also known as a cyber simulator, at least 32 of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Elizabeth Bates , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

Reward design is a critical part of the application of reinforcement learning, the performance of which strongly depends on how well the reward signal frames the goal of the designer and how well the signal assesses progress in reaching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Yixiang Wang , Yujing Hu , Feng Wu , Yingfeng Chen

Sparsity of rewards while applying a deep reinforcement learning method negatively affects its sample-efficiency. A viable solution to deal with the sparsity of rewards is to learn via intrinsic motivation which advocates for adding an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Jiong Li , Pratik Gajane

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…

The challenge of spatial resource allocation is pervasive across various domains such as transportation, industry, and daily life. As the scale of real-world issues continues to expand and demands for real-time solutions increase,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Di Zhang , Moyang Wang , Joseph Mango , Xiang Li , Xianrui Xu

While using shaped rewards can be beneficial when solving sparse reward tasks, their successful application often requires careful engineering and is problem specific. For instance, in tasks where the agent must achieve some goal state,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Alexander Trott , Stephan Zheng , Caiming Xiong , Richard Socher

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Minjae Cho , Huy Trong Tran

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to be often unsuccessful in environments with sparse extrinsic rewards. A possible countermeasure is to endow RL agents with an intrinsic reward function, or 'intrinsic motivation', which rewards the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Francesco Massari , Martin Biehl , Lisa Meeden , Ryota Kanai

In constrained reinforcement learning (RL), a learning agent seeks to not only optimize the overall reward but also satisfy the additional safety, diversity, or budget constraints. Consequently, existing constrained RL solutions require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Sobhan Miryoosefi , Chi Jin

Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-10 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

Deep reinforcement learning enables algorithms to learn complex behavior, deal with continuous action spaces and find good strategies in environments with high dimensional state spaces. With deep reinforcement learning being an active area…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-17 Winfried Lötzsch

In recent years Landmark Complexes have been successfully employed for localization-free and metric-free autonomous exploration using a group of sensing-limited and communication-limited robots in a GPS-denied environment. To ensure rapid…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Xiatao Sun , Yuwei Wu , Subhrajit Bhattacharya , Vijay Kumar

In this paper, we confront the problem of applying reinforcement learning to agents that perceive the environment through many sensors and that can perform parallel actions using many actuators as is the case in complex autonomous robots.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-07-04 E. Celaya , J. M. Porta

Efficient and effective learning is one of the ultimate goals of the deep reinforcement learning (DRL), although the compromise has been made in most of the time, especially for the application of robot manipulations. Learning is always…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Yongle Luo , Kun Dong , Lili Zhao , Zhiyong Sun , Chao Zhou , Bo Song

Learning effective policies for sparse objectives is a key challenge in Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). A common approach is to design task-related dense rewards to improve task learnability. While such rewards are easily interpreted,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-12 Hassam Sheikh , Shauharda Khadka , Santiago Miret , Somdeb Majumdar