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Discovering achievements with a hierarchical structure in procedurally generated environments presents a significant challenge. This requires an agent to possess a broad range of abilities, including generalization and long-term reasoning.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Seungyong Moon , Junyoung Yeom , Bumsoo Park , Hyun Oh Song

Decision-making problems in uncertain or stochastic domains are often formulated as Markov decision processes (MDPs). Policy iteration (PI) is a popular algorithm for searching over policy-space, the size of which is exponential in the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-30 Yishay Mansour , Satinder Singh

Recent GRPO-based approaches built on flow matching models have shown remarkable improvements in human preference alignment for text-to-image generation. Nevertheless, they still suffer from the sparse reward problem: the terminal reward of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Haoyou Deng , Keyu Yan , Chaojie Mao , Xiang Wang , Yu Liu , Changxin Gao , Nong Sang

We consider model-free reinforcement learning for infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with a continuous state space and unknown transition kernel, when only a single sample path under an arbitrary policy of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-24 Devavrat Shah , Qiaomin Xie

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has emerged as a promising paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models particularly in mathematics. Current approaches in this domain present a clear trade-off:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Batuhan K. Karaman , Aditya Rawal , Suhaila Shakiah , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Mingyi Hong , Arijit Biswas , Ruida Zhou

We consider local planning in fixed-horizon MDPs with a generative model under the assumption that the optimal value function lies close to the span of a feature map. The generative model provides a local access to the MDP: The planner can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-12 Gellért Weisz , Philip Amortila , Barnabás Janzer , Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Nan Jiang , Csaba Szepesvári

We study offline Reinforcement Learning in large infinite-horizon discounted Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the reward and transition models are linearly realizable under a known feature map. Starting from the classic linear-program…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Gergely Neu , Nneka Okolo

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms have been shown to learn complex tasks using highly general policy classes. However, sparse reward problems remain a significant challenge. Exploration methods based on novelty detection have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-30 Justin Fu , John D. Co-Reyes , Sergey Levine

Efficient exploration is a central problem in reinforcement learning and is often formalized as maximizing the entropy of the state-action occupancy measure. While unconstrained maximum-entropy exploration is relatively well understood,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Florian Wolf , Ilyas Fatkhullin , Niao He

We study the problem of deployment efficient reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation under the \emph{reward-free} exploration setting. This is a well-motivated problem because deploying new policies is costly in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Dan Qiao , Yu-Xiang Wang

Ensuring safety is important for the practical deployment of reinforcement learning (RL). Various challenges must be addressed, such as handling stochasticity in the environments, providing rigorous guarantees of persistent state-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Milan Ganai , Zheng Gong , Chenning Yu , Sylvia Herbert , Sicun Gao

The epidemic failure of replicability across empirical science and machine learning has recently motivated the formal study of replicable learning algorithms [Impagliazzo et al. (2022)]. In batch settings where data comes from a fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Max Hopkins , Sihan Liu , Christopher Ye , Yuichi Yoshida

Exploration in high-dimensional, continuous spaces with sparse rewards is an open problem in reinforcement learning. Artificial curiosity algorithms address this by creating rewards that lead to exploration. Given a reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Alexander Nedergaard , Matthew Cook

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is exploration, when local dithering methods such as epsilon-greedy sampling are insufficient to solve a given task. Many recent methods have proposed to intrinsically motivate an agent to seek…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-15 Riley Simmons-Edler , Ben Eisner , Daniel Yang , Anthony Bisulco , Eric Mitchell , Sebastian Seung , Daniel Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

The most data-efficient algorithms for reinforcement learning in robotics are model-based policy search algorithms, which alternate between learning a dynamical model of the robot and optimizing a policy to maximize the expected return…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-05 Rituraj Kaushik , Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis , Jean-Baptiste Mouret

Current reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can be brittle and difficult to use, especially when learning goal-reaching behaviors from sparse rewards. Although supervised imitation learning provides a simple and stable alternative, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Dibya Ghosh , Abhishek Gupta , Ashwin Reddy , Justin Fu , Coline Devin , Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine

Actor-critic (AC) algorithms are a class of model-free deep reinforcement learning algorithms, which have proven their efficacy in diverse domains, especially in solving continuous control problems. Improvement of exploration (action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Chayan Banerjee , Zhiyong Chen , Nasimul Noman

A fundamental question in reinforcement learning is whether model-free algorithms are sample efficient. Recently, Jin et al. \cite{jin2018q} proposed a Q-learning algorithm with UCB exploration policy, and proved it has nearly optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-30 Kefan Dong , Yuanhao Wang , Xiaoyu Chen , Liwei Wang

This paper considers the problem of efficient exploration of unseen environments, a key challenge in AI. We propose a `learning to explore' framework where we learn a policy from a distribution of environments. At test time, presented with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Hanjun Dai , Yujia Li , Chenglong Wang , Rishabh Singh , Po-Sen Huang , Pushmeet Kohli