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Designing rewards for Reinforcement Learning (RL) is challenging because it needs to convey the desired task, be efficient to optimize, and be easy to compute. The latter is particularly problematic when applying RL to robotics, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-28 Yiming Ding , Carlos Florensa , Mariano Phielipp , Pieter Abbeel

This paper describes an improvement in Deep Q-learning called Reverse Experience Replay (also RER) that solves the problem of sparse rewards and helps to deal with reward maximizing tasks by sampling transitions successively in reverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-24 Egor Rotinov

Experience replay is a key component in reinforcement learning for stabilizing learning and improving sample efficiency. Its typical implementation samples transitions with replacement from a replay buffer. In contrast, in supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Yasuhiro Fujita

Robotic grasping is a crucial area of research as it can result in the acceleration of the automation of several Industries utilizing robots ranging from manufacturing to healthcare. Reinforcement learning is the field of study where an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-01-14 Raghav Nagpal , Achyuthan Unni Krishnan , Hanshen Yu

Several algorithms have been proposed to sample non-uniformly the replay buffer of deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents to speed-up learning, but very few theoretical foundations of these sampling schemes have been provided. Among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-15 Thibault Lahire , Matthieu Geist , Emmanuel Rachelson

In many real-world scenarios, reward signal for agents are exceedingly sparse, making it challenging to learn an effective reward function for reward shaping. To address this issue, the proposed approach in this paper performs reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Wenyun Li , Wenjie Huang , Chen Sun

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms allow for agents to learn new behaviors from small amounts of experience, mitigating the sample inefficiency problem in RL. However, while meta-RL agents can adapt quickly to new tasks at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Michael Wan , Jian Peng , Tanmay Gangwani

Reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from slow convergence due to sparse reward signals, particularly in complex environments where feedback is delayed or infrequent. This paper introduces the Psychological Regret Model (PRM), a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Zhe Xu

One of the notorious issues for Reinforcement Learning (RL) is poor sample efficiency. Compared to single agent RL, the sample efficiency for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is more challenging because of its inherent partial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Linjie Xu , Zichuan Liu , Alexander Dockhorn , Diego Perez-Liebana , Jinyu Wang , Lei Song , Jiang Bian

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

Successfully navigating a complex environment to obtain a desired outcome is a difficult task, that up to recently was believed to be capable only by humans. This perception has been broken down over time, especially with the introduction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Joshua Hare

This paper presents a benchmarking study of some of the state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms used for solving two simulated vision-based robotics problems. The algorithms considered in this study include soft actor-critic…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-01-13 Swagat Kumar , Hayden Sampson , Ardhendu Behera

Experience replay is a key technique behind many recent advances in deep reinforcement learning. Allowing the agent to learn from earlier memories can speed up learning and break undesirable temporal correlations. Despite its wide-spread…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-19 Ruishan Liu , James Zou

While large language models excel in diverse domains, their performance on complex longhorizon agentic decision-making tasks remains limited. Most existing methods concentrate on designing effective reward models (RMs) to advance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Zhicong Lu , Zichuan Lin , Wei Jia , Changyuan Tian , Deheng Ye , Peiguang Li , Li Jin , Nayu Liu , Guangluan Xu , Wei Feng

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) with sparse rewards remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning. While hindsight experience replay (HER) has shown promise by relabeling collected trajectories with achieved…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Xing Lei , Wenyan Yang , Kaiqiang Ke , Shentao Yang , Xuetao Zhang , Joni Pajarinen , Donglin Wang

Multi-Agent Experience Replay (MER) is a key component of off-policy reinforcement learning~(RL) algorithms. By remembering and reusing experiences from the past, experience replay significantly improves the stability of RL algorithms and…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Kailash Gogineni , Yongsheng Mei , Peng Wei , Tian Lan , Guru Venkataramani

In this paper, we propose a novel technique, Back-stepping Experience Replay (BER), that is compatible with arbitrary off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. BER aims to enhance learning efficiency in systems with approximate…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Xinda Qi , Dong Chen , Zhaojian Li , Xiaobo Tan

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 usually uses the feedback rewards of environmental to train agents. But the rewards in the actual environment are sparse, and even some environments will not rewards. Most of the current methods are difficult to get…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-13 Kai Jiang , XiaoLong Qin

Learning complex tasks from scratch is challenging and often impossible for humans as well as for artificial agents. A curriculum can be used instead, which decomposes a complex task (target task) into a sequence of source tasks (the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-24 Binyamin Manela , Armin Biess