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Reward shaping allows reinforcement learning (RL) agents to accelerate learning by receiving additional reward signals. However, these signals can be difficult to design manually, especially for complex RL tasks. We propose a simple and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-11 Niels Justesen , Sebastian Risi

Efficient exploration in deep cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) still remains challenging in complex coordination problems. In this paper, we introduce a novel Episodic Multi-agent reinforcement learning with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Lulu Zheng , Jiarui Chen , Jianhao Wang , Jiamin He , Yujing Hu , Yingfeng Chen , Changjie Fan , Yang Gao , Chongjie Zhang

This paper explores the combination of two intrinsic motivation strategies to improve the efficiency of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in environments with extreme sparse rewards, where traditional learning struggles due to infrequent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 André Quadros , Cassio Silva , Ronnie Alves

Transfer and adaptation to new unknown environmental dynamics is a key challenge for reinforcement learning (RL). An even greater challenge is performing near-optimally in a single attempt at test time, possibly without access to dense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-14 Jiachen Yang , Brenden Petersen , Hongyuan Zha , Daniel Faissol

Deep reinforcement learning methods traditionally struggle with tasks where environment rewards are particularly sparse. One successful method of guiding exploration in these domains is to imitate trajectories provided by a human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-03 Yusuf Aytar , Tobias Pfaff , David Budden , Tom Le Paine , Ziyu Wang , Nando de Freitas

Designing dense rewards is crucial for reinforcement learning (RL), yet in robotics it often demands extensive manual effort and lacks scalability. One promising solution is to view task progress as a dense reward signal, as it quantifies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Yuyang Liu , Chuan Wen , Yihang Hu , Dinesh Jayaraman , Yang Gao

Learning a policy capable of moving an agent between any two states in the environment is important for many robotics problems involving navigation and manipulation. Due to the sparsity of rewards in such tasks, applying reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-07-05 Artem Molchanov , Karol Hausman , Stan Birchfield , Gaurav Sukhatme

Solving sparse reward tasks through exploration is one of the major challenges in deep reinforcement learning, especially in three-dimensional, partially-observable environments. Critically, the algorithm proposed in this article uses a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Gabriele Libardi , Gianni De Fabritiis

Mastering multiple tasks through exploration and learning in an environment poses a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Unsupervised RL has been introduced to address this challenge by training policies with intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Junkai Zhang , Weitong Zhang , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

Sequence generation with reinforcement learning (RL) has received significant attention recently. However, a challenge with such methods is the sparse-reward problem in the RL training process, in which a scalar guiding signal is often only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-11-05 Ruiyi Zhang , Changyou Chen , Zhe Gan , Wenlin Wang , Liqun Chen , Dinghan Shen , Guoyin Wang , Lawrence Carin

In this paper, we introduce Reward-RAG, a novel approach designed to enhance the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model through Reward-Driven Supervision. Unlike previous RAG methodologies, which focus on training language models (LMs)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Thang Nguyen , Peter Chin , Yu-Wing Tai

Fast adapting to unknown peers (partners or opponents) with different strategies is a key challenge in multi-agent games. To do so, it is crucial for the agent to probe and identify the peer's strategy efficiently, as this is the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Long Ma , Yuanfei Wang , Fangwei Zhong , Song-Chun Zhu , Yizhou Wang

We present a new computing model for intrinsic rewards in reinforcement learning that addresses the limitations of existing surprise-driven explorations. The reward is the novelty of the surprise rather than the surprise norm. We estimate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-01 Hung Le , Kien Do , Dung Nguyen , Svetha Venkatesh

The success of popular algorithms for deep reinforcement learning, such as policy-gradients and Q-learning, relies heavily on the availability of an informative reward signal at each timestep of the sequential decision-making process. When…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-26 Tanmay Gangwani , Qiang Liu , Jian Peng

Sparse-reward domains are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms since significant exploration is needed before encountering reward for the first time. Hierarchical reinforcement learning can facilitate exploration by reducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-13 Lorenzo Steccanella , Simone Totaro , Damien Allonsius , Anders Jonsson

We consider episodic reinforcement learning in reward-mixing Markov decision processes (RMMDPs): at the beginning of every episode nature randomly picks a latent reward model among $M$ candidates and an agent interacts with the MDP…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-07 Jeongyeol Kwon , Yonathan Efroni , Constantine Caramanis , Shie Mannor

In reinforcement learning (RL), rewards of states are typically considered additive, and following the Markov assumption, they are $\textit{independent}$ of states visited previously. In many important applications, such as coverage…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Manish Prajapat , Mojmír Mutný , Melanie N. Zeilinger , Andreas Krause

Intrinsic reward shaping has emerged as a prevalent approach to solving hard-exploration and sparse-rewards environments in reinforcement learning (RL). While single intrinsic rewards, such as curiosity-driven or novelty-based methods, have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Mingqi Yuan , Bo Li , Xin Jin , Wenjun Zeng

Long-horizon precision manipulation in laboratory automation, such as pipette tip attachment and liquid transfer, requires policies that respect strict procedural logic while operating in continuous, high-dimensional state spaces. However,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yibo Qiu , Shu'ang Sun , Haoliang Ye , Ronald X Xu , Mingzhai Sun

Reward engineering and designing an incentive reward function are non-trivial tasks to train agents in complex environments. Furthermore, an inaccurate reward function may lead to a biased behaviour which is far from an efficient and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-05-04 Saeed Tafazzol , Erfan Fathi , Mahdi Rezaei , Ehsan Asali