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Many reinforcement learning (RL) environments consist of independent entities that interact sparsely. In such environments, RL agents have only limited influence over other entities in any particular situation. Our idea in this work is that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-03 Maximilian Seitzer , Bernhard Schölkopf , Georg Martius

Safety in goal directed Reinforcement Learning (RL) settings has typically been handled through constraints over trajectories and have demonstrated good performance in primarily short horizon tasks. In this paper, we are specifically…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-01-10 Yuxiao Lu , Arunesh Sinha , Pradeep Varakantham

This paper proposes an efficient approach to learning disentangled representations with causal mechanisms based on the difference of conditional probabilities in original and new distributions. We approximate the difference with models'…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-03 Yuanpeng Li , Joel Hestness , Mohamed Elhoseiny , Liang Zhao , Kenneth Church

Intrinsic rewards can improve exploration in reinforcement learning, but the exploration process may suffer from instability caused by non-stationary reward shaping and strong dependency on hyperparameters. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Lukas Schäfer , Filippos Christianos , Josiah P. Hanna , Stefano V. Albrecht

Modern listwise recommendation systems need to consider both long-term user perceptions and short-term interest shifts. Reinforcement learning can be applied on recommendation to study such a problem but is also subject to large search…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Luo Ji , Gao Liu , Mingyang Yin , Hongxia Yang , Jingren Zhou

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) learns to make decisions on multiple levels of temporal abstraction. A key challenge in HRL is that the low-level policy changes over time, making it difficult for the high-level policy to generate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Vivienne Huiling Wang , Tinghuai Wang , Joni Pajarinen

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is a promising approach to solving long-horizon problems with sparse and delayed rewards. Many existing HRL algorithms either use pre-trained low-level skills that are unadaptable, or require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-11 Siyuan Li , Rui Wang , Minxue Tang , Chongjie Zhang

Hierarchical agents have the potential to solve sequential decision making tasks with greater sample efficiency than their non-hierarchical counterparts because hierarchical agents can break down tasks into sets of subtasks that only…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Andrew Levy , George Konidaris , Robert Platt , Kate Saenko

Teaching a deep reinforcement learning (RL) agent to follow instructions in multi-task environments is a challenging problem. We consider that user defines every task by a linear temporal logic (LTL) formula. However, some causal…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Duo Xu , Faramarz Fekri

In the training process of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), agents require repetitive interactions with the environment. With an increase in training volume and model complexity, it is still a challenging problem to enhance data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Jingwen Wang , Dehui Du , Yida Li , Yiyang Li , Yikang Chen

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms have been successfully applied to a range of challenging control tasks. However, these methods typically struggle with achieving effective exploration and are extremely sensitive to the choice of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Shauharda Khadka , Somdeb Majumdar , Tarek Nassar , Zach Dwiel , Evren Tumer , Santiago Miret , Yinyin Liu , Kagan Tumer

Sparse rewards and long time horizons remain challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms. Exploration bonuses can help in sparse reward settings by encouraging agents to explore the state space, while hierarchical approaches can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-08-13 Willie McClinton , Andrew Levy , George Konidaris

Reinforcement learning can train LLM agents from sparse task rewards, but long-horizon credit assignment remains challenging: a single success-or-failure signal must be distributed across many actions. Existing methods rely on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Xiaozhe Li , Tianyi Lyu , Yang Li , Yichuan Ma , Peiji Li , Linyang Li , Qipeng Guo , Dahua Lin , Kai Chen

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) has seen widespread interest as an approach to tractable learning of complex modular behaviors. However, existing work either assume access to expert-constructed hierarchies, or use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Kurtland Chua , Qi Lei , Jason D. Lee

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) promises to solve long-horizon Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks more efficiently than non-hierarchical counterparts by discovering and reusing temporally-extended skills. However, obtaining skills…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Sarthak Dayal , Abhinav Peri , Carl Qi , Claas Voelcker , Alexander Levine , Caleb Chuck , Amy Zhang

Recent advancements in reinforcement learning have made significant impacts across various domains, yet they often struggle in complex multi-agent environments due to issues like algorithm instability, low sampling efficiency, and the…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Cheng Xu , Changtian Zhang , Yuchen Shi , Ran Wang , Shihong Duan , Yadong Wan , Xiaotong Zhang

Model-free continuous control for robot navigation tasks using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) that relies on noisy policies for exploration is sensitive to the density of rewards. In practice, robots are usually deployed in cluttered…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-02-24 Mingyu Cai , Erfan Aasi , Calin Belta , Cristian-Ioan Vasile

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) enhances the understanding of the effects of the randomness in the environment by letting agents learn the distribution of a random return, rather than its expected value as in standard RL. At the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-27 Zifan Wang , Yulong Gao , Siyi Wang , Michael M. Zavlanos , Alessandro Abate , Karl H. Johansson

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) has recently shown promising advances on speeding up learning, improving the exploration, and discovering intertask transferable skills. Most recent works focus on HRL with two levels, i.e., a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-14 Yuhang Song , Jianyi Wang , Thomas Lukasiewicz , Zhenghua Xu , Mai Xu

Generating explanations for reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging as actions may produce long-term effects on the future. In this paper, we develop a novel framework for explainable RL by learning a causal world model without prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-19 Zhongwei Yu , Jingqing Ruan , Dengpeng Xing