English
Related papers

Related papers: Dealing with Sparse Rewards in Reinforcement Learn…

200 papers

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for autonomously acquiring complex behaviors from low level sensor observations. Although a large portion of deep RL research has focused on applications in video games…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Julian Ibarz , Jie Tan , Chelsea Finn , Mrinal Kalakrishnan , Peter Pastor , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms find applications in inventory control, recommender systems, vehicular traffic management, cloud computing and robotics. The real-world complications of many tasks arising in these domains makes them…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-03 Sindhu Padakandla

The problem of sparse rewards is one of the hardest challenges in contemporary reinforcement learning. Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) tackles this problem by using a set of temporally-extended actions, or options, each of which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-14 Nat Dilokthanakul , Christos Kaplanis , Nick Pawlowski , Murray Shanahan

We study a class of constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which multiple constraint specifications are not identified before training. It is challenging to identify appropriate constraint specifications due to the undefined…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-01-02 Dongsheng Ding , Zhengyan Huan , Alejandro Ribeiro

Despite groundbreaking progress in reinforcement learning for robotics, gameplay, and other complex domains, major challenges remain in applying reinforcement learning to the evolving, open-world problems often found in critical application…

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Meng Cao , Lei Shu , Lei Yu , Yun Zhu , Nevan Wichers , Yinxiao Liu , Lei Meng

Sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) can model a wide range of highly complex tasks. Solving sparse-reward tasks is RL's core premise, requiring efficient exploration coupled with long-horizon credit assignment, and overcoming these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Leander Diaz-Bone , Marco Bagatella , Jonas Hübotter , Andreas Krause

Sparse reward environments pose significant challenges in reinforcement learning, especially within multi-agent systems (MAS) where feedback is delayed and shared across agents, leading to suboptimal learning. We propose Collaborative…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Yufei Lin , Chengwei Ye , Huanzhen Zhang , Kangsheng Wang , Linuo Xu , Shuyan Liu , Zeyu Zhang

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been successful in training agents in various learning environments, including video-games. However, such work modifies and shrinks the action space from the game's original. This is to avoid trying…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-05-27 Anssi Kanervisto , Christian Scheller , Ville Hautamäki

Applying reinforcement learning (RL) to sparse reward domains is notoriously challenging due to insufficient guiding signals. Common RL techniques for addressing such domains include (1) learning from demonstrations and (2) curriculum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-29 Vaibhav Bajaj , Guni Sharon , Peter Stone

Being able to reason in an environment with a large number of discrete actions is essential to bringing reinforcement learning to a larger class of problems. Recommender systems, industrial plants and language models are only some of the…

Mastering robotic manipulation skills through reinforcement learning (RL) typically requires the design of shaped reward functions. Recent developments in this area have demonstrated that using sparse rewards, i.e. rewarding the agent only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-12 Ozsel Kilinc , Giovanni Montana

Reinforcement learning has emerged as an important approach for autonomous driving. A reward function is used in reinforcement learning to establish the learned skill objectives and guide the agent toward the optimal policy. Since…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Ahmed Abouelazm , Jonas Michel , J. Marius Zoellner

Realistic environments often provide agents with very limited feedback. When the environment is initially unknown, the feedback, in the beginning, can be completely absent, and the agents may first choose to devote all their effort on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Pierre Ménard , Omar Darwiche Domingues , Anders Jonsson , Emilie Kaufmann , Edouard Leurent , Michal Valko

Reinforcement learning provides an automated framework for learning behaviors from high-level reward specifications, but in practice the choice of reward function can be crucial for good results -- while in principle the reward only needs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Abhishek Gupta , Aldo Pacchiano , Yuexiang Zhai , Sham M. Kakade , Sergey Levine

A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-21 Paulo Rauber , Avinash Ummadisingu , Filipe Mutz , Juergen Schmidhuber

Reinforcement learning (RL) faces challenges in evaluating policy trajectories within intricate game tasks due to the difficulty in designing comprehensive and precise reward functions. This inherent difficulty curtails the broader…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Zichao Shen , Tianchen Zhu , Qingyun Sun , Shiqi Gao , Jianxin Li

The reinforcement learning (RL) research area is very active, with an important number of new contributions; especially considering the emergent field of deep RL (DRL). However a number of scientific and technical challenges still need to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Arthur Aubret , Laetitia Matignon , Salima Hassas

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great promise with algorithms learning in environments with large state and action spaces purely from scalar reward signals. A crucial challenge for current deep RL algorithms is that they require a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Shivakanth Sujit , Pedro H. M. Braga , Jorg Bornschein , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

With the breakthrough of AlphaGo, deep reinforcement learning becomes a recognized technique for solving sequential decision-making problems. Despite its reputation, data inefficiency caused by its trial and error learning mechanism makes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-01 Qiyue Yin , Tongtong Yu , Shengqi Shen , Jun Yang , Meijing Zhao , Kaiqi Huang , Bin Liang , Liang Wang