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In many environments only a tiny subset of all states yield high reward. In these cases, few of the interactions with the environment provide a relevant learning signal. Hence, we may want to preferentially train on those high-reward states…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms can suffer from poor sample efficiency when rewards are delayed and sparse. We introduce a solution that enables agents to learn temporally extended actions at multiple levels of abstraction in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-11 Andrew Levy , Robert Platt , Kate Saenko

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) exploits temporally extended actions, or options, to make decisions from a higher-dimensional perspective to alleviate the sparse reward problem, one of the most challenging problems in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Libo Xing

There is a recent trend of applying multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to train an agent that can cooperate with humans in a zero-shot fashion without using any human data. The typical workflow is to first repeatedly run self-play…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Chao Yu , Jiaxuan Gao , Weilin Liu , Botian Xu , Hao Tang , Jiaqi Yang , Yu Wang , Yi Wu

Experience replay is one of the most commonly used approaches to improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning algorithms. In this work, we propose an approach to select and replay sequences of transitions in order to accelerate…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-09-29 Thommen George Karimpanal , Roland Bouffanais

In many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL), performing actions requires consuming certain types of resources that are non-replenishable in each episode. Typical applications include robotic control with limited energy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Zhihai Wang , Taoxing Pan , Qi Zhou , Jie Wang

We study continual learning in the large scale setting where tasks in the input sequence are not limited to classification, and the outputs can be of high dimension. Among multiple state-of-the-art methods, we found vanilla experience…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Yogesh Balaji , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Dong Yin , Alex Mott , Ang Li

Conceived in the early 1990s, Experience Replay (ER) has been shown to be a successful mechanism to allow online learning algorithms to reuse past experiences. Traditionally, ER can be applied to all machine learning paradigms (i.e.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-19 Decebal Constantin Mocanu , Maria Torres Vega , Eric Eaton , Peter Stone , Antonio Liotta

Reinforcement Learning algorithms aim to learn optimal control strategies through iterative interactions with an environment. A critical element in this process is the experience replay buffer, which stores past experiences, allowing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Hoda Yamani , Yuning Xing , Lee Violet C. Ong , Bruce A. MacDonald , Henry Williams

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

Experience replay enables data-efficient learning from past experiences in online reinforcement learning agents. Traditionally, experiences were sampled uniformly from a replay buffer, regardless of differences in experience-specific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Leonard S. Pleiss , Tobias Sutter , Maximilian Schiffer

Continual learning seeks to enable machine learning systems to solve an increasing corpus of tasks sequentially. A critical challenge for continual learning is forgetting, where the performance on previously learned tasks decreases as new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Yasaman Mahdaviyeh , James Lucas , Mengye Ren , Andreas S. Tolias , Richard Zemel , Toniann Pitassi

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

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents can often be difficult, involving meticulous design of reward functions that are sufficiently informative yet easy enough to provide. Human-in-the-loop RL methods allow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Kimin Lee , Laura Smith , Pieter Abbeel

Reward engineering and designing an incentive reward function are non-trivial tasks to train agents in complex environments. Furthermore, an inaccurate reward function may lead to a biased behaviour which is far from an efficient and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-05-04 Saeed Tafazzol , Erfan Fathi , Mahdi Rezaei , Ehsan Asali

Training LLMs as interactive agents for multi-turn decision-making remains challenging, particularly in long-horizon tasks with sparse and delayed rewards, where agents must execute extended sequences of actions before receiving meaningful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jiangweizhi Peng , Yuanxin Liu , Ruida Zhou , Charles Fleming , Zhaoran Wang , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

Deep Reinforcement Learning agents often suffer from catastrophic forgetting, forgetting previously found solutions in parts of the input space when training on new data. Replay Memories are a common solution to the problem, decorrelating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-29 Muhammad Burhan Hafez , Tilman Immisch , Tom Weber , Stefan Wermter

Currently, deep reinforcement learning (RL) shows impressive results in complex gaming and robotic environments. Often these results are achieved at the expense of huge computational costs and require an incredible number of episodes of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Alexey Skrynnik , Aleksey Staroverov , Ermek Aitygulov , Kirill Aksenov , Vasilii Davydov , Aleksandr I. Panov

Sparse-reward domains are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms since significant exploration is needed before encountering reward for the first time. Hierarchical reinforcement learning can facilitate exploration by reducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-13 Lorenzo Steccanella , Simone Totaro , Damien Allonsius , Anders Jonsson

Transformers achieve state-of-the-art performance for natural language processing tasks by pre-training on large-scale text corpora. They are extremely compute-intensive and have very high sample complexity. Memory replay is a mechanism…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-23 Rui Liu , Barzan Mozafari