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Recent reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have shown strong performance in complex domains such as Atari games, but are often highly sample inefficient. A common approach to reduce interaction time with the environment is to use reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Prasoon Goyal , Scott Niekum , Raymond J. Mooney

It is a long-standing challenge to enable an intelligent agent to learn in one environment and generalize to an unseen environment without further data collection and finetuning. In this paper, we consider a zero shot generalization problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Huazhe Xu , Boyuan Chen , Yang Gao , Trevor Darrell

To achieve the ambitious goals of artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning must include planning with a model of the world that is abstract in state and time. Deep learning has made progress with state abstraction, but temporal…

While deep reinforcement learning (RL) promises freedom from hand-labeled data, great successes, especially for Embodied AI, require significant work to create supervision via carefully shaped rewards. Indeed, without shaped rewards, i.e.,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-10-14 Unnat Jain , Iou-Jen Liu , Svetlana Lazebnik , Aniruddha Kembhavi , Luca Weihs , Alexander Schwing

Reinforcement learning algorithms require many samples when solving complex hierarchical tasks with sparse and delayed rewards. For such complex tasks, the recently proposed RUDDER uses reward redistribution to leverage steps in the…

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

Many reinforcement learning environments (e.g., Minecraft) provide only sparse rewards that indicate task completion or failure with binary values. The challenge in exploration efficiency in such environments makes it difficult for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Hao Li , Xue Yang , Zhaokai Wang , Xizhou Zhu , Jie Zhou , Yu Qiao , Xiaogang Wang , Hongsheng Li , Lewei Lu , Jifeng Dai

We treat the problem of autonomous acquisition of manipulation skills where problem-solving strategies are initially available only for a narrow range of situations. We propose to extend the range of solvable situations by autonomous…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-06-28 Simon Hangl , Vedran Dunjko , Hans J. Briegel , Justus Piater

In order to solve a task using reinforcement learning, it is necessary to first formalise the goal of that task as a reward function. However, for many real-world tasks, it is very difficult to manually specify a reward function that never…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-13 Joar Skalse , Lucy Farnik , Sumeet Ramesh Motwani , Erik Jenner , Adam Gleave , Alessandro Abate

Reward function is essential in reinforcement learning (RL), serving as the guiding signal to incentivize agents to solve given tasks, however, is also notoriously difficult to design. In many cases, only imperfect rewards are available,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Jianxiong Li , Xiao Hu , Haoran Xu , Jingjing Liu , Xianyuan Zhan , Qing-Shan Jia , Ya-Qin Zhang

The temporal lag between actions and their long-term consequences makes credit assignment a challenge when learning goal-directed behaviors from data. Generative world models capture the distribution of future states an agent may visit,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Aravind Venugopal , Jiayu Chen , Xudong Wu , Chongyi Zheng , Benjamin Eysenbach , Jeff Schneider

To achieve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL), it necessitates efficiently exploring the underlying environment. Under the offline setting, addressing the exploration challenge lies in collecting an offline dataset with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Shuang Qiu , Jieping Ye , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

To convey desired behavior to a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, a designer must choose a reward function for the environment, arguably the most important knob designers have in interacting with RL agents. Although many reward functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Henry Sowerby , Zhiyuan Zhou , Michael L. Littman

We address the problem of effectively composing skills to solve sparse-reward tasks in the real world. Given a set of parameterized skills (such as exerting a force or doing a top grasp at a location), our goal is to learn policies that…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-02-28 Rohan Chitnis , Shubham Tulsiani , Saurabh Gupta , Abhinav Gupta

Reward shaping is effective in addressing the sparse-reward challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) by providing immediate feedback through auxiliary, informative rewards. Based on the reward shaping strategy, we propose a novel multi-task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Haozhe Ma , Zhengding Luo , Thanh Vinh Vo , Kuankuan Sima , Tze-Yun Leong

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has progressed from simple control tasks to complex real-world challenges with large state spaces. While RL excels in these tasks, training time remains a limitation. Reward shaping is a popular solution, but…

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their selection of actions to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Temporal Difference (TD) Learning -- a model-free RL method -- is a leading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

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…

Reward machines inform reinforcement learning agents about the reward structure of the environment and often drastically speed up the learning process. However, reward machines only accept Boolean features such as robot-reached-gold.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Kristina Levina , Nikolaos Pappas , Athanasios Karapantelakis , Aneta Vulgarakis Feljan , Jendrik Seipp

Reward shaping is critical in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly for complex tasks where sparse rewards can hinder learning. However, choosing effective shaping rewards from a set of reward functions in a computationally efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Chen Bo Calvin Zhang , Zhang-Wei Hong , Aldo Pacchiano , Pulkit Agrawal