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Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown impressive success in exploring high-dimensional environments to learn complex tasks, but can often exhibit unsafe behaviors and require extensive environment interaction when exploration is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-22 Albert Wilcox , Ashwin Balakrishna , Brijen Thananjeyan , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Ken Goldberg

Reinforcement learning (RL) is ubiquitous in the development of modern AI systems. However, state-of-the-art RL agents require extensive, and potentially unsafe, interactions with their environments to learn effectively. These limitations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Yarden As , Bhavya Sukhija , Lenart Treven , Carmelo Sferrazza , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause

Designing effective reward functions remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, especially in multi-objective environments. In this work, we propose Multi-Objective Reward Shaping with Exploration (MORSE), a general framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Yuqing Xie , Jiayu Chen , Wenhao Tang , Ya Zhang , Chao Yu , Yu Wang

How to efficiently explore in reinforcement learning is an open problem. Many exploration algorithms employ the epistemic uncertainty of their own value predictions -- for instance to compute an exploration bonus or upper confidence bound.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Simon Schmitt , John Shawe-Taylor , Hado van Hasselt

We address the problem of Bayesian reinforcement learning using efficient model-based online planning. We propose an optimism-free Bayes-adaptive algorithm to induce deeper and sparser exploration with a theoretical bound on its performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Divya Grover , Debabrota Basu , Christos Dimitrakakis

Deep neural networks have achieved impressive results on a wide variety of tasks. However, quantifying uncertainty in the network's output is a challenging task. Bayesian models offer a mathematical framework to reason about model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Manikanta Srikar Yellapragada , Chandra Prakash Konkimalla

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a computational approach to reward-driven learning in sequential decision problems. It implements the discovery of optimal actions by learning from an agent interacting with an environment rather than from…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-06 Mauricio Tec , Yunshan Duan , Peter Müller

Agentic search enables language models to solve knowledge-intensive tasks by adaptively acquiring external evidence over multiple steps. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a widely adopted training paradigm…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Erhan Zhang , Yiqun Chen , Zechun Niu , Wei Yang , Xiaochi Wei , Yan Gao , Yi Wu , Yao Hu , Jiaxin Mao

Performing Reinforcement Learning in sparse rewards settings, with very little prior knowledge, is a challenging problem since there is no signal to properly guide the learning process. In such situations, a good search strategy is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Giuseppe Paolo , Alban Laflaquière , Alexandre Coninx , Stephane Doncieux

Deep learning has achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning (RL) problems when dense reward function is provided. However, in sparse reward environment it still often suffers from the need to carefully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Hao Liu , Alexander Trott , Richard Socher , Caiming Xiong

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

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

Traditional imitation learning provides a set of methods and algorithms to learn a reward function or policy from expert demonstrations. Learning from demonstration has been shown to be advantageous for navigation tasks as it allows for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Christian Ellis , Maggie Wigness , John G. Rogers , Craig Lennon , Lance Fiondella

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

Reinforcement learning algorithms rely on carefully engineering environment rewards that are extrinsic to the agent. However, annotating each environment with hand-designed, dense rewards is not scalable, motivating the need for developing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-14 Yuri Burda , Harri Edwards , Deepak Pathak , Amos Storkey , Trevor Darrell , Alexei A. Efros

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Philippe Morere , Gilad Francis , Tom Blau , Fabio Ramos

We propose Scheduled Auxiliary Control (SAC-X), a new learning paradigm in the context of Reinforcement Learning (RL). SAC-X enables learning of complex behaviors - from scratch - in the presence of multiple sparse reward signals. To this…

Learning in sparse reward settings remains a challenge in Reinforcement Learning, which is often addressed by using intrinsic rewards. One promising strategy is inspired by human curiosity, requiring the agent to learn to predict the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-02 Gino Brunner , Manuel Fritsche , Oliver Richter , Roger Wattenhofer

Learning from diverse offline datasets is a promising path towards learning general purpose robotic agents. However, a core challenge in this paradigm lies in collecting large amounts of meaningful data, while not depending on a human in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Annie S. Chen , HyunJi Nam , Suraj Nair , Chelsea Finn

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel