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Related papers: Self-Supervised Online Reward Shaping in Sparse-Re…

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Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

Reward-based fine-tuning steers a pretrained diffusion or flow-based generative model toward higher-reward samples while remaining close to the pretrained model. Although existing methods are derived from different perspectives, we show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Jeongjae Lee , Jinho Chang , Jeongsol Kim , Jong Chul Ye

Reinforcement learning (RL) in sparse-reward environments remains a significant challenge due to the lack of informative feedback. We propose a simple yet effective method that uses a small number of successful demonstrations to initialize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Seyed Mahdi Basiri Azad , Joschka Boedecker

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

Subject-driven image generation models face a fundamental trade-off between identity preservation (fidelity) and prompt adherence (editability). While online reinforcement learning (RL), specifically GPRO, offers a promising solution, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Ziwei Huang , Ying Shu , Hao Fang , Quanyu Long , Wenya Wang , Qiushi Guo , Tiezheng Ge , Leilei Gan

We study the problem of online multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in environments with sparse rewards, where reward feedback is not provided at each interaction but only revealed at the end of a trajectory. This setting, though…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 The Viet Bui , Tien Mai , Hong Thanh Nguyen

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents often face challenges in balancing exploration and exploitation, particularly in environments where sparse or dense rewards bias learning. Biological systems, such as human toddlers, naturally navigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Junseok Park , Hyeonseo Yang , Min Whoo Lee , Won-Seok Choi , Minsu Lee , Byoung-Tak Zhang

Developing agents that can execute multiple skills by learning from pre-collected datasets is an important problem in robotics, where online interaction with the environment is extremely time-consuming. Moreover, manually designing reward…

Long-term temporal credit assignment is an important challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). It refers to the ability of the agent to attribute actions to consequences that may occur after a long time interval. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Tanmay Gangwani , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng

The last few years have seen an explosion of interest in autonomous cyber defence agents based on deep reinforcement learning. Such agents are typically trained in a cyber gym environment, also known as a cyber simulator, at least 32 of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Elizabeth Bates , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

Recent RL research has utilized reward shaping--particularly complex shaping rewards such as intrinsic motivation (IM)--to encourage agent exploration in sparse-reward environments. While often effective, ``reward hacking'' can lead to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Grant C. Forbes , Jianxun Wang , Leonardo Villalobos-Arias , Arnav Jhala , David L. Roberts

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in autonomous cyber defence agents trained to defend computer networks using deep reinforcement learning. These agents are typically trained in cyber gym environments using dense, highly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Elizabeth Bates , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

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

Successfully navigating a complex environment to obtain a desired outcome is a difficult task, that up to recently was believed to be capable only by humans. This perception has been broken down over time, especially with the introduction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Joshua Hare

In the search for more sample-efficient reinforcement-learning (RL) algorithms, a promising direction is to leverage as much external off-policy data as possible. For instance, expert demonstrations. In the past, multiple ideas have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Jesus Bujalance Martin , Fabien Moutarde

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

Automatically synthesizing dense rewards from natural language descriptions is a promising paradigm in reinforcement learning (RL), with applications to sparse reward problems, open-ended exploration, and hierarchical skill design. Recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Qinqing Zheng , Mikael Henaff , Amy Zhang , Aditya Grover , Brandon Amos

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective tool for real-world recommender systems with its capacity to model the dynamic interest of users and its interactive nature. Most existing offline RL recommender systems focus on…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Yi Zhang , Ruihong Qiu , Jiajun Liu , Sen Wang

Aligning generative real-world image super-resolution models with human visual preference is challenging due to the perception--fidelity trade-off and diverse, unknown degradations. Prior approaches rely on offline preference optimization…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Shijie Zhao , Xuanyu Zhang , Bin Chen , Weiqi Li , Qunliang Xing , Kexin Zhang , Yan Wang , Junlin Li , Li Zhang , Jian Zhang , Tianfan Xue

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