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This paper introduces ACS2HER, a novel integration of the Anticipatory Classifier System (ACS2) with the Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) mechanism. While ACS2 is highly effective at building cognitive maps through latent learning, its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Olgierd Unold , Stanisław Franczyk

We propose a graphical model framework for goal-conditioned RL, with an EM algorithm that operates on the lower bound of the RL objective. The E-step provides a natural interpretation of how 'learning in hindsight' techniques, such as HER,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Yunhao Tang , Alp Kucukelbir

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) provides a way to learn high-performance policies in environments where the reward signal is hard to specify, avoiding heuristic and time-consuming reward design. However, PbRL can suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Chenyang Cao , Miguel Rogel-García , Mohamed Nabail , Xueqian Wang , Nicholas Rhinehart

Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting challenge in deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Despite dramatic improvements have been made, the problem is far from being solved and is especially challenging in environments with sparse or delayed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Federico Malato , Ville Hautamaki

Exploration in environments with sparse feedback remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning (RL). When the RL agent explores the environment randomly, it results in low exploration efficiency, especially in robotic…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Boyao Li , Tao Lu , Jiayi Li , Ning Lu , Yinghao Cai , Shuo Wang

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) has gained much attention for its ability to learn complex behaviors in a sample-efficient way: planning actions by generating imaginary trajectories with predicted rewards. Despite its success, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Vint Lee , Pieter Abbeel , Youngwoon Lee

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely deployed across numerous fields. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) leverages reward models (RMs) as proxies for human preferences to align LLM behaviors with human values, making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Shuyi Zhang , Wei Shi , Sihang Li , Jiayi Liao , Hengxing Cai , Xiang Wang

While reinforcement learning (RL) has been successful in natural language processing (NLP) domains such as dialogue generation and text-based games, it typically faces the problem of sparse rewards that leads to slow or no convergence.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Ameet Deshpande , Eve Fleisig

Class-bias, that is class-wise performance disparities, is typically attributed to data imbalance and addressed through frequency-based resampling. However, we demonstrate that substantial bias persists even in perfectly balanced datasets,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Pawel Pukowski , Venet Osmani

Sparse rewards are a major bottleneck in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where simultaneous learning induces non-stationarity and makes reward design especially delicate. Reward shaping can accelerate learning, but in the…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Elie Abboud , Oren Gal

State of the art deep reinforcement learning algorithms are sample inefficient due to the large number of episodes they require to achieve asymptotic performance. Episodic Reinforcement Learning (ERL) algorithms, inspired by the mammalian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Ismael T. Freire , Adrián F. Amil , Paul F. M. J. Verschure

Sparse reward environments pose a significant challenge for reinforcement learning due to the scarcity of feedback. Intrinsic motivation and transfer learning have emerged as promising strategies to address this issue. Change Based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-28 Jeremias Ferrao , Rafael Cunha

Sample inefficiency of deep reinforcement learning methods is a major obstacle for their use in real-world applications. In this work, we show how human demonstrations can improve final performance of agents on the Minecraft minigame…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-16 Christian Scheller , Yanick Schraner , Manfred Vogel

Effective decision-making in partially observable environments demands robust memory management. Despite their success in supervised learning, current deep-learning memory models struggle in reinforcement learning environments that are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Hung Le , Kien Do , Dung Nguyen , Sunil Gupta , Svetha Venkatesh

Natural language instruction following is paramount to enable collaboration between artificial agents and human beings. Natural language-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) agents have shown how natural languages' properties, such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Kevin Denamganaï , Daniel Hernandez , Ozan Vardal , Sondess Missaoui , James Alfred Walker

Many scenes in real life can be abstracted to the sparse reward visual scenes, where it is difficult for an agent to tackle the task under the condition of only accepting images and sparse rewards. We propose to decompose this problem into…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Zheng Fang , Biao Zhao , Guizhong Liu

Complex sequential tasks in continuous-control settings often require agents to successfully traverse a set of "narrow passages" in their state space. Solving such tasks with a sparse reward in a sample-efficient manner poses a challenge to…

Sample efficiency is a fundamental challenge in de novo molecular design. Ideally, molecular generative models should learn to satisfy a desired objective under minimal oracle evaluations (computational prediction or wet-lab experiment).…

Biomolecules · Quantitative Biology 2023-05-26 Jeff Guo , Philippe Schwaller

In this paper, we investigate the use of small datasets in the context of offline reinforcement learning (RL). While many common offline RL benchmarks employ datasets with over a million data points, many offline RL applications rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Samin Yeasar Arnob , Scott Fujimoto , Doina Precup

Recently, a new trend of exploring sparsity for accelerating neural network training has emerged, embracing the paradigm of training on the edge. This paper proposes a novel Memory-Economic Sparse Training (MEST) framework targeting for…