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Related papers: Sparse Reward Exploration via Novelty Search and E…

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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

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

Mastering deep reinforcement learning (DRL) proves challenging in tasks featuring scant rewards. These limited rewards merely signify whether the task is partially or entirely accomplished, necessitating various exploration actions before…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang

Learning with sparse rewards remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), especially when the aim is to train a policy capable of achieving multiple different goals. To date, the most successful approaches for dealing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Henry Charlesworth , Giovanni Montana

Sparse reward environments are known to be challenging for reinforcement learning agents. In such environments, efficient and scalable exploration is crucial. Exploration is a means by which an agent gains information about the environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Jacob Chmura , Hasham Burhani , Xiao Qi Shi

For compressive sensing of dynamic sparse signals, we develop an iterative pursuit algorithm. A dynamic sparse signal process is characterized by varying sparsity patterns over time/space. For such signals, the developed algorithm is able…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-10-15 Dave Zachariah , Saikat Chatterjee , Magnus Jansson

Reward models (RMs) are a core component in the post-training of large language models (LLMs), serving as proxies for human preference evaluation and guiding model alignment. However, training reliable RMs under limited resources remains…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Dengcan Liu , Jiahao Li , Zheren Fu , Yi Tu , Jiajun Li , Zhendong Mao , Yongdong Zhang

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

One of the main problems of evolutionary algorithms is the convergence of the population to local minima. In this paper, we explore techniques that can avoid this problem by encouraging a diverse behavior of the agents through a shared…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-08-04 David Herel , Dominika Zogatova , Matej Kripner , Tomas Mikolov

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

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) has achieved notable success in continuous control tasks but struggles in sparse reward settings, where infrequent rewards make efficient exploration challenging. While novelty-based exploration methods address this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Shih-Min Yang , Martin Magnusson , Johannes A. Stork , Todor Stoyanov

Contemporary Deep Neural Network (DNN) contains millions of synaptic connections with tens to hundreds of layers. The large computation and memory requirements pose a challenge to the hardware design. In this work, we leverage the intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-07 Jingyang Zhu , Jingbo Jiang , Xizi Chen , Chi-Ying Tsui

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 introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

Autonomous exploration in complex multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) with sparse rewards critically depends on providing agents with effective intrinsic motivation. While artificial curiosity offers a powerful self-supervised signal,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yiyuan Pan , Zhe Liu , Hesheng Wang

Exploring in environments with high-dimensional observations is hard. One promising approach for exploration is to use intrinsic rewards, which often boils down to estimating "novelty" of states, transitions, or trajectories with deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Toru Lin , Allan Jabri

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Simone Parisi , Davide Tateo , Maximilian Hensel , Carlo D'Eramo , Jan Peters , Joni Pajarinen

Sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) can model a wide range of highly complex tasks. Solving sparse-reward tasks is RL's core premise, requiring efficient exploration coupled with long-horizon credit assignment, and overcoming these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Leander Diaz-Bone , Marco Bagatella , Jonas Hübotter , Andreas Krause

Reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when the reward signal is very sparse. In these cases, naive random exploration methods essentially rely on a random walk to stumble onto a rewarding state. Recent works utilize intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-14 Hyoungseok Kim , Jaekyeom Kim , Yeonwoo Jeong , Sergey Levine , Hyun Oh Song