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Designing an effective reward function has long been a challenge in reinforcement learning, particularly for complex tasks in unstructured environments. To address this, various learning paradigms have emerged that leverage different forms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Muhammad Qasim Elahi , Somtochukwu Oguchienti , Maheed H. Ahmed , Mahsa Ghasemi

Exploration is essential for reinforcement learning (RL). To face the challenges of exploration, we consider a reward-free RL framework that completely separates exploration from exploitation and brings new challenges for exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Chuheng Zhang , Yuanying Cai , Longbo Huang , Jian Li

Efficient exploration for automatic subgoal discovery is a challenging problem in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL). In this paper, we show that intrinsic motivation learning increases the efficiency of exploration, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-25 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

Deep learning has achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning (RL) problems when dense reward function is provided. However, in sparse reward environment it still often suffers from the need to carefully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Hao Liu , Alexander Trott , Richard Socher , Caiming Xiong

Fine-tuned large language models can exhibit reward-hacking behavior arising from emergent misalignment, which is difficult to detect from final outputs alone. While prior work has studied reward hacking at the level of completed responses,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Patrick Wilhelm , Thorsten Wittkopp , Odej Kao

Model-based reinforcement learning is a promising learning strategy for practical robotic applications due to its improved data-efficiency versus model-free counterparts. However, current state-of-the-art model-based methods rely on shaped…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-10 Robert McCarthy , Qiang Wang , Stephen J. Redmond

Dealing with sparse rewards is a longstanding challenge in reinforcement learning. The recent use of hindsight methods have achieved success on a variety of sparse-reward tasks, but they fail on complex tasks such as stacking multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 John B. Lanier , Stephen McAleer , Pierre Baldi

Recent advances in sparse reward policy gradient methods have enabled effective reinforcement learning (RL)-based language model post-training. However, for reasoning tasks such as mathematical problem solving, binarized outcome rewards…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Yongjae Lee , Taekhyun Park , Sunghyun Sim , Hyerim Bae

Model free reinforcement learning suffers from the high sampling complexity inherent to robotic manipulation or locomotion tasks. Most successful approaches typically use random sampling strategies which leads to slow policy convergence. In…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-08-13 Miroslav Bogdanovic , Ludovic Righetti

In many real-world scenarios where extrinsic rewards to the agent are extremely sparse, curiosity has emerged as a useful concept providing intrinsic rewards that enable the agent to explore its environment and acquire information to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Jivat Neet Kaur , Yiding Jiang , Paul Pu Liang

Multi-goal reinforcement learning (RL) aims to qualify the agent to accomplish multi-goal tasks, which is of great importance in learning scalable robotic manipulation skills. However, reward engineering always requires strenuous efforts in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Deyu Yang , Hanbo Zhang , Xuguang Lan , Jishiyu Ding

Sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) remains fundamentally hard: without structure, any agent needs $\Omega(|\mathcal{S}||\mathcal{A}|/p)$ samples to recover rewards. We introduce Policy-Aware Matrix Completion (PAMC) as a first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Ibne Farabi Shihab , Sanjeda Akter , Anuj Sharma

Intrinsic motivation enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to explore when rewards are very sparse, where traditional exploration heuristics such as Boltzmann or e-greedy would typically fail. However, intrinsic exploration is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Philippe Morere , Fabio Ramos

Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Cevahir Koprulu , Ufuk Topcu

Designing a distribution of environments in which RL agents can learn interesting and useful skills is a challenging and poorly understood task, for multi-agent environments the difficulties are only exacerbated. One approach is to train a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-07 Ingmar Kanitscheider , Harri Edwards

Exploration poses a fundamental challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) with sparse rewards, limiting an agent's ability to learn optimal decision-making due to a lack of informative feedback signals. Self-Imitation Learning (self-IL) has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Alain Andres , Daochen Zha , Javier Del Ser

Reinforcement learning, which acquires a policy maximizing long-term rewards, has been actively studied. Unfortunately, this learning type is too slow and difficult to use in practical situations because the state-action space becomes huge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Takato Okudo , Seiji Yamada

In continuous control, exploration is often performed through undirected strategies in which parameters of the networks or selected actions are perturbed by random noise. Although the deep setting of undirected exploration has been shown to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Baturay Saglam , Suleyman S. Kozat

Deep reinforcement learning methods exhibit impressive performance on a range of tasks but still struggle on hard exploration tasks in large environments with sparse rewards. To address this, intrinsic rewards can be generated using forward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Jaedong Hwang , Zhang-Wei Hong , Eric Chen , Akhilan Boopathy , Pulkit Agrawal , Ila Fiete

Exploration in environments with sparse feedback remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning (RL). When the RL agent explores the environment randomly, it results in low exploration efficiency, especially in robotic…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Boyao Li , Tao Lu , Jiayi Li , Ning Lu , Yinghao Cai , Shuo Wang