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Rehearsal is a critical component for class-incremental continual learning, yet it requires a substantial memory budget. Our work investigates whether we can significantly reduce this memory budget by leveraging unlabeled data from an…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-05-07 James Smith , Jonathan Balloch , Yen-Chang Hsu , Zsolt Kira

This paper studies the error metric selection for long-term memory learning in sequence modelling. We examine the bias towards short-term memory in commonly used errors, including mean absolute/squared error. Our findings show that all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-24 Shida Wang , Zhanglu Yan

Achieving sample efficiency in online episodic reinforcement learning (RL) requires optimally balancing exploration and exploitation. When it comes to a finite-horizon episodic Markov decision process with $S$ states, $A$ actions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Gen Li , Laixi Shi , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi

A common challenge in reinforcement learning is how to convert the agent's interactions with an environment into fast and robust learning. For instance, earlier work makes use of domain knowledge to improve existing reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-01 Yannis Flet-Berliac , Philippe Preux

Reinforcement Learning(RL) with sparse rewards is a major challenge. We propose \emph{Hindsight Trust Region Policy Optimization}(HTRPO), a new RL algorithm that extends the highly successful TRPO algorithm with \emph{hindsight} to tackle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Hanbo Zhang , Site Bai , Xuguang Lan , David Hsu , Nanning Zheng

Large-scale machine learning (ML) models are increasingly being used in critical domains like education, lending, recruitment, healthcare, criminal justice, etc. However, the training, deployment, and utilization of these models demand…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Ding Zhu , Zhiqun Zuo , Mohammad Mahdi Khalili

In Continual Learning, a Neural Network is trained on a stream of data whose distribution shifts over time. Under these assumptions, it is especially challenging to improve on classes appearing later in the stream while remaining accurate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Pietro Buzzega , Matteo Boschini , Angelo Porrello , Simone Calderara

Actor critic methods with sparse rewards in model-based deep reinforcement learning typically require a deterministic binary reward function that reflects only two possible outcomes: if, for each step, the goal has been achieved or not. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Juan Vargas , Lazar Andjelic , Amir Barati Farimani

Neural networks augmented with external memory have the ability to learn algorithmic solutions to complex tasks. These models appear promising for applications such as language modeling and machine translation. However, they scale poorly in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-31 Jack W Rae , Jonathan J Hunt , Tim Harley , Ivo Danihelka , Andrew Senior , Greg Wayne , Alex Graves , Timothy P Lillicrap

Reinforcement learning (RL) often struggles with reward misalignment, where agents optimize given rewards but fail to exhibit the desired behaviors. This arises when the reward function incentivizes proxy behaviors misaligned with the true…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Mohammad Saif Nazir , Chayan Banerjee

We propose a generic reward shaping approach for improving the rate of convergence in reinforcement learning (RL), called Self Improvement Based REwards, or SIBRE. The approach is designed for use in conjunction with any existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-22 Somjit Nath , Richa Verma , Abhik Ray , Harshad Khadilkar

Reinforcement learning has shown great potential in solving complex tasks when large amounts of data can be generated with little effort. In robotics, one approach to generate training data builds on simulations based on dynamics models…

Artificial learning systems aspire to mimic human intelligence by continually learning from a stream of tasks without forgetting past knowledge. One way to enable such learning is to store past experiences in the form of input examples in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Gobinda Saha , Kaushik Roy

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is challenging because an agent can rarely obtain non-zero rewards and hence, gradient-based optimization of parameterized policies can be incremental and slow. Recent work demonstrated that using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yijie Guo , Jongwook Choi , Marcin Moczulski , Shengyu Feng , Samy Bengio , Mohammad Norouzi , Honglak Lee

The ability of reinforcement learning algorithms to learn effective policies is determined by the rewards available during training. However, for practical problems, obtaining large quantities of reward labels is often infeasible due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Shreyas Chaudhari , Renhao Zhang , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

Learning with sparse rewards remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), especially when the aim is to train a policy capable of achieving multiple different goals. To date, the most successful approaches for dealing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Henry Charlesworth , Giovanni Montana

This work studies heterogeneous Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL), where objectives can differ sharply in temporal frequency. Such heterogeneity allows dense objectives to dominate learning, while sparse long-horizon rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Finn van der Knaap , Kejiang Qian , Zheng Xu , Fengxiang He

Robotic manipulation and control has increased in importance in recent years. However, state of the art techniques still have limitations when required to operate in real world applications. This paper explores Hindsight Experience Replay…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Francisco Roldan Sanchez , Stephen Redmond , Kevin McGuinness , Noel O'Connor

Reinforcement learning methods have been used for learning dialogue policies. However, learning an effective dialogue policy frequently requires prohibitively many conversations. This is partly because of the sparse rewards in dialogues,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-11-26 Keting Lu , Shiqi Zhang , Xiaoping Chen

Designing missiles' autopilot controllers has been a complex task, given the extensive flight envelope and the nonlinear flight dynamics. A solution that can excel both in nominal performance and in robustness to uncertainties is still to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Bernardo Cortez