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Learning to solve tasks from a sparse reward signal is a major challenge for standard reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. However, in the real world, agents rarely need to solve sparse reward tasks entirely from scratch. More often, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-22 Qiyang Li , Jason Zhang , Dibya Ghosh , Amy Zhang , Sergey Levine

Autonomous robots are commonly tasked with the problem of area exploration and search for certain targets or artifacts of interest to be tracked. Traditionally, the problem formulation considered is that of complete search and thus -…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-12-13 Christos Papachristos , Kostas Alexis

While using shaped rewards can be beneficial when solving sparse reward tasks, their successful application often requires careful engineering and is problem specific. For instance, in tasks where the agent must achieve some goal state,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Alexander Trott , Stephan Zheng , Caiming Xiong , Richard Socher

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as curriculum learning and Go-Explore often rely on hand-crafted heuristics, while curiosity-driven…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Georgios Sotirchos , Zlatan Ajanović , Jens Kober

Exploration in sparse reward environments remains one of the key challenges of model-free reinforcement learning. Instead of solely relying on extrinsic rewards provided by the environment, many state-of-the-art methods use intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Roberta Raileanu , Tim Rocktäschel

Deep neural networks include millions of learnable parameters, making their deployment over resource-constrained devices problematic. SeReNe (Sensitivity-based Regularization of Neurons) is a method for learning sparse topologies with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Enzo Tartaglione , Andrea Bragagnolo , Francesco Odierna , Attilio Fiandrotti , Marco Grangetto

Novelty search (NS) refers to a class of exploration algorithms that seek to uncover diverse system behaviors through simulations or experiments. Such diversity is central to many AI-driven discovery and design tasks, including material and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-31 Wei-Ting Tang , Ankush Chakrabarty , Joel A. Paulson

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely deployed across numerous fields. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) leverages reward models (RMs) as proxies for human preferences to align LLM behaviors with human values, making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Shuyi Zhang , Wei Shi , Sihang Li , Jiayi Liao , Hengxing Cai , Xiang Wang

Efficient learning in the environment with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). In continuous DRL environments such as robotic arms control, Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) has been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-02-07 Qiwei He , Liansheng Zhuang , Houqiang Li

Solving multi-goal reinforcement learning (RL) problems with sparse rewards is generally challenging. Existing approaches have utilized goal relabeling on collected experiences to alleviate issues raised from sparse rewards. However, these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Rui Yang , Meng Fang , Lei Han , Yali Du , Feng Luo , Xiu Li

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

Using a low-dimensional parametrization of signals is a generic and powerful way to enhance performance in signal processing and statistical inference. A very popular and widely explored type of dimensionality reduction is sparsity; another…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-04-02 Benjamin Aubin , Bruno Loureiro , Antoine Maillard , Florent Krzakala , Lenka Zdeborová

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

Subset selection is a fundamental problem in combinatorial optimization, which has a wide range of applications such as influence maximization and sparse regression. The goal is to select a subset of limited size from a ground set in order…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Yiheng Xu , Danxuan Liu , Bin Zhang , Weiyong Yang , Chao Qian

In this study, we address the problem of efficient exploration in reinforcement learning. Most common exploration approaches depend on random action selection, however these approaches do not work well in environments with sparse or no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-30 Doğay Kamar , Nazım Kemal Üre , Gözde Ünal

Designing effective reward functions remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, especially in multi-objective environments. In this work, we propose Multi-Objective Reward Shaping with Exploration (MORSE), a general framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Yuqing Xie , Jiayu Chen , Wenhao Tang , Ya Zhang , Chao Yu , Yu Wang

This paper describes an improvement in Deep Q-learning called Reverse Experience Replay (also RER) that solves the problem of sparse rewards and helps to deal with reward maximizing tasks by sampling transitions successively in reverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-24 Egor Rotinov

Equation discovery is a fundamental learning task for uncovering the underlying dynamics of complex systems, with wide-ranging applications in areas such as brain connectivity analysis, climate modeling, gene regulation, and physical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Jiaqiang Li , Jianbin Tan , Xueqin Wang

Scalable and effective exploration remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). While there are methods with optimality guarantees in the setting of discrete state and action spaces, these methods cannot be applied in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-30 Rein Houthooft , Xi Chen , Yan Duan , John Schulman , Filip De Turck , Pieter Abbeel

Over-parameterization of deep neural networks (DNNs) has shown high prediction accuracy for many applications. Although effective, the large number of parameters hinders its popularity on resource-limited devices and has an outsize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Shaoyi Huang , Bowen Lei , Dongkuan Xu , Hongwu Peng , Yue Sun , Mimi Xie , Caiwen Ding