English
Related papers

Related papers: Synthetic Returns for Long-Term Credit Assignment

200 papers

Skill-based reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy to leverage prior knowledge for accelerated robot learning. Skills are typically extracted from expert demonstrations and are embedded into a latent space from…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-07 Krishan Rana , Ming Xu , Brendan Tidd , Michael Milford , Niko Sünderhauf

The relationship between a reinforcement learning (RL) agent and an asynchronous environment is often ignored. Frequently used models of the interaction between an agent and its environment, such as Markov Decision Processes (MDP) or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-29 Jaden B. Travnik , Kory W. Mathewson , Richard S. Sutton , Patrick M. Pilarski

Reinforcement learning (RL) holds significant promise for training LLM agents to handle complex, goal-oriented tasks that require multi-step interactions with external environments. However, a critical challenge when applying RL to these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Hanlin Wang , Chak Tou Leong , Jiashuo Wang , Jian Wang , Wenjie Li

The function approximators employed by traditional image-based Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms usually lack a temporal learning component and instead focus on learning the spatial component. We propose a technique, Temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Deepak George Thomas , Tichakorn Wongpiromsarn , Ali Jannesari

Recently, various auxiliary tasks have been proposed to accelerate representation learning and improve sample efficiency in deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, existing auxiliary tasks do not take the characteristics of RL problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-23 Guoqing Liu , Chuheng Zhang , Li Zhao , Tao Qin , Jinhua Zhu , Jian Li , Nenghai Yu , Tie-Yan Liu

Sampling is ubiquitous in machine learning methodologies. Due to the growth of large datasets and model complexity, we want to learn and adapt the sampling process while training a representation. Towards achieving this grand goal, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-14 Jason Xiaotian Dou , Alvin Qingkai Pan , Runxue Bao , Haiyi Harry Mao , Lei Luo , Zhi-Hong Mao

While reinforcement learning (RL) provides a framework for learning through trial and error, translating RL algorithms into the real world has remained challenging. A major hurdle to real-world application arises from the development of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-12 Archit Sharma , Rehaan Ahmad , Chelsea Finn

Oftentimes, environments for sequential decision-making problems can be quite sparse in the provision of evaluative feedback to guide reinforcement-learning agents. In the extreme case, long trajectories of behavior are merely punctuated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Akash Velu , Skanda Vaidyanath , Dilip Arumugam

Future reward estimation is a core component of reinforcement learning agents; i.e., Q-value and state-value functions, predicting an agent's sum of future rewards. Their scalar output, however, obfuscates when or what individual future…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Mark Towers , Yali Du , Christopher Freeman , Timothy J. Norman

How can we train agents to navigate uncertainty over long horizons? In this work, we propose {\Delta}Belief-RL, which leverages a language model's own intrinsic beliefs to reward intermediate progress. Our method utilizes the change in the…

Most deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms distill experience into parametric behavior policies or value functions via gradient updates. While effective, this approach has several disadvantages: (1) it is computationally expensive,…

The average reward is a fundamental performance metric in reinforcement learning (RL) focusing on the long-run performance of an agent. Differential temporal difference (TD) learning algorithms are a major advance for average reward RL as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Ethan Blaser , Jiuqi Wang , Shangtong Zhang

In recent years, the successor representation (SR) has attracted increasing attention in reinforcement learning (RL), and it has been used to address some of its key challenges, such as exploration, credit assignment, and generalization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Hon Tik Tse , Siddarth Chandrasekar , Marlos C. Machado

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a trending field of research, showing great promise in challenging problems such as playing Atari, solving Go and controlling robots. While DRL agents perform well in practice we are still lacking the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-06-17 Nir Baram , Tom Zahavy , Shie Mannor

The recent focus and release of pre-trained models have been a key components to several advancements in many fields (e.g. Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision), as a matter of fact, pre-trained models learn disparate latent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Elia Piccoli , Malio Li , Giacomo Carfì , Vincenzo Lomonaco , Davide Bacciu

In reinforcement learning, Return, which is the weighted accumulated future rewards, and Value, which is the expected return, serve as the objective that guides the learning of the policy. In classic RL, return is defined as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Yufei Wang , Qiwei Ye , Tie-Yan Liu

We propose a multi-agent distributed reinforcement learning algorithm that balances between potentially conflicting short-term reward and sparse, delayed long-term reward, and learns with partial information in a dynamic environment. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-06 Jing Tan , Ramin Khalili , Holger Karl

Reinforcement learning has been applied to many interesting problems such as the famous TD-gammon and the inverted helicopter flight. However, little effort has been put into developing methods to learn policies for complex persistent tasks…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-06-22 Xiao Li , Calin Belta

Reinforcement learning involves agents interacting with an environment to complete tasks. When rewards provided by the environment are sparse, agents may not receive immediate feedback on the quality of actions that they take, thereby…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Baicen Xiao , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Radha Poovendran

We study reinforcement learning (RL) with no-reward demonstrations, a setting in which an RL agent has access to additional data from the interaction of other agents with the same environment. However, it has no access to the rewards or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-11 Angelos Filos , Clare Lyle , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine , Natasha Jaques , Gregory Farquhar