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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

Dealing with environments with sparse rewards has always been crucial for systems developed to operate in autonomous open-ended learning settings. Intrinsic Motivations could be an effective way to help Deep Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Gianluca Maselli , Vieri Giuliano Santucci

Reward shaping is a technique in reinforcement learning that addresses the sparse-reward problem by providing more frequent and informative rewards. We introduce a self-adaptive and highly efficient reward shaping mechanism that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Haozhe Ma , Zhengding Luo , Thanh Vinh Vo , Kuankuan Sima , Tze-Yun Leong

In swarm robotics, confrontation scenarios, including strategic confrontations, require efficient decision-making that integrates discrete commands and continuous actions. Traditional task and motion planning methods separate…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Qizhen Wu , Lei Chen , Kexin Liu , Jinhu Lu

Reinforcement learning is a machine learning approach based on behavioral psychology. It is focused on learning agents that can acquire knowledge and learn to carry out new tasks by interacting with the environment. However, a problem…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Hugo Muñoz , Ernesto Portugal , Angel Ayala , Bruno Fernandes , Francisco Cruz

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) improves the efficiency of long-horizon reinforcement-learning tasks with sparse rewards by decomposing the task into a hierarchy of subgoals. The main challenge of HRL is efficient discovery of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Sadegh Khorasani , Saber Salehkaleybar , Negar Kiyavash , Matthias Grossglauser

Reward machines are an established tool for dealing with reinforcement learning problems in which rewards are sparse and depend on complex sequences of actions. However, existing algorithms for learning reward machines assume an overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jan Corazza , Ivan Gavran , Daniel Neider

General purpose agents will require large repertoires of skills. Empowerment -- the maximum mutual information between skills and states -- provides a pathway for learning large collections of distinct skills, but mutual information is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Andrew Levy , Sreehari Rammohan , Alessandro Allievi , Scott Niekum , George Konidaris

We address the problem of learning hierarchical deep neural network policies for reinforcement learning. In contrast to methods that explicitly restrict or cripple lower layers of a hierarchy to force them to use higher-level modulating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-05 Tuomas Haarnoja , Kristian Hartikainen , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning algorithms have successfully been applied to temporal credit assignment problems with sparse reward signals. However, state-of-the-art algorithms require manual specification of sub-task structures, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-24 Robert Tjarko Lange , Aldo Faisal

Intelligent agents must pursue their goals in complex environments with partial information and often limited computational capacity. Reinforcement learning methods have achieved great success by creating agents that optimize engineered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Alejandro Daniel Noel , Charel van Hoof , Beren Millidge

While recent progress in deep reinforcement learning has enabled robots to learn complex behaviors, tasks with long horizons and sparse rewards remain an ongoing challenge. In this work, we propose an effective reward shaping method through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Xingyu Lu , Stas Tiomkin , Pieter Abbeel

An autonomous agent embodied in a humanoid robot, in order to learn from the overwhelming flow of raw and noisy sensory, has to effectively reduce the high spatial-temporal data dimensionality. In this paper we propose a novel method of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-04-11 Wojciech Skaba

In recent years, reinforcement learning has achieved many remarkable successes due to the growing adoption of deep learning techniques and the rapid growth in computing power. Nevertheless, it is well-known that flat reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Le Pham Tuyen , Ngo Anh Vien , Abu Layek , TaeChoong Chung

Practising and honing skills forms a fundamental component of how humans learn, yet artificial agents are rarely specifically trained to perform them. Instead, they are usually trained end-to-end, with the hope being that useful skills will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-17 Michael Matthews , Mikayel Samvelyan , Jack Parker-Holder , Edward Grefenstette , Tim Rocktäschel

Deep reinforcement learning enables algorithms to learn complex behavior, deal with continuous action spaces and find good strategies in environments with high dimensional state spaces. With deep reinforcement learning being an active area…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-17 Winfried Lötzsch

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Minjae Cho , Huy Trong Tran

Learning effective policies for sparse objectives is a key challenge in Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). A common approach is to design task-related dense rewards to improve task learnability. While such rewards are easily interpreted,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-12 Hassam Sheikh , Shauharda Khadka , Santiago Miret , Somdeb Majumdar

Despite advances in hierarchical reinforcement learning, its applications to path planning in autonomous driving on highways are challenging. One reason is that conventional hierarchical reinforcement learning approaches are not amenable to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Jaehyun Kim , Jaeseung Jeong

One of the main challenges in reinforcement learning is solving tasks with sparse reward. We show that the difficulty of discovering a distant rewarding state in an MDP is bounded by the expected cover time of a random walk over the graph…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-03-19 Yuu Jinnai , Jee Won Park , David Abel , George Konidaris