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Related papers: Reward Shaping with Dynamic Trajectory Aggregation

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Standard reinforcement learning (RL) assumes that an agent can observe a reward for each state-action pair. However, in practical applications, it is often difficult and costly to collect a reward for each state-action pair. While there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Yihan Du , Anna Winnicki , Gal Dalal , Shie Mannor , R. Srikant

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

Controlled text generation tasks such as unsupervised text style transfer have increasingly adopted the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL). A major challenge in applying RL to such tasks is the sparse reward, which is available only after…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-19 Bhargav Upadhyay , Akhilesh Sudhakar , Arjun Maheswaran

Reinforcement learning (RL) in long horizon and sparse reward tasks is notoriously difficult and requires a lot of training steps. A standard solution to speed up the process is to leverage additional reward signals, shaping it to better…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Thomas Carta , Pierre-Yves Oudeyer , Olivier Sigaud , Sylvain Lamprier

Crowd simulation is important for video-games design, since it enables to populate virtual worlds with autonomous avatars that navigate in a human-like manner. Reinforcement learning has shown great potential in simulating virtual crowds,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-25 Ariel Kwiatkowski , Vicky Kalogeiton , Julien Pettré , Marie-Paule Cani

The proliferation of ride-hailing aggregator platforms presents significant growth opportunities for ride-service providers by increasing order volume and gross merchandise value (GMV). On most ride-hailing aggregator platforms, service…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Fangzhou Shi , Xiaopeng Ke , Xinye Xiong , Kexin Meng , Chang Men , Zhengdan Zhu

Improving sample efficiency is a key challenge in reinforcement learning, especially in environments with large state spaces and sparse rewards. In literature, this is resolved either through the use of auxiliary tasks (subgoals) or through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Durgesh Kalwar , Omkar Shelke , Somjit Nath , Hardik Meisheri , Harshad Khadilkar

Many real-world robot learning problems, such as pick-and-place or arriving at a destination, can be seen as a problem of reaching a goal state as soon as possible. These problems, when formulated as episodic reinforcement learning tasks,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-10 Gautham Vasan , Yan Wang , Fahim Shahriar , James Bergstra , Martin Jagersand , A. Rupam Mahmood

We study dynamic discrete choice models, where a commonly studied problem involves estimating parameters of agent reward functions (also known as "structural" parameters), using agent behavioral data. Maximum likelihood estimation for such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Sinong Geng , Houssam Nassif , Carlos A. Manzanares

The problem of sparse rewards is one of the hardest challenges in contemporary reinforcement learning. Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) tackles this problem by using a set of temporally-extended actions, or options, each of which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-14 Nat Dilokthanakul , Christos Kaplanis , Nick Pawlowski , Murray Shanahan

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in solving complex problems through reinforcement learning (RL), particularly by generating long reasoning traces. However, these extended outputs often exhibit substantial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Wei Liu , Ruochen Zhou , Yiyun Deng , Yuzhen Huang , Junteng Liu , Yuntian Deng , Yizhe Zhang , Junxian He

Leveraging multimodal large models for image segmentation has become a prominent research direction. However, existing approaches typically rely heavily on manually annotated datasets that include explicit reasoning processes, which are…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Jiaqi Huang , Zunnan Xu , Jun Zhou , Ting Liu , Yicheng Xiao , Mingwen Ou , Bowen Ji , Xiu Li , Kehong Yuan

Learning continuous control in high-dimensional sparse reward settings, such as robotic manipulation, is a challenging problem due to the number of samples often required to obtain accurate optimal value and policy estimates. While many…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-29 Sreehari Rammohan , Shangqun Yu , Bowen He , Eric Hsiung , Eric Rosen , Stefanie Tellex , George Konidaris

Reinforcement learning agents learn from rewards, but humans can uniquely assign value to novel, abstract outcomes in a goal-dependent manner. However, this flexibility is cognitively costly, making learning less efficient. Here, we propose…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-09-11 Gaia Molinaro , Anne G. E. Collins

Providing a suitable reward function to reinforcement learning can be difficult in many real world applications. While inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) holds promise for automatically learning reward functions from demonstrations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Lantao Yu , Tianhe Yu , Chelsea Finn , Stefano Ermon

We introduce Self-supervised Online Reward Shaping (SORS), which aims to improve the sample efficiency of any RL algorithm in sparse-reward environments by automatically densifying rewards. The proposed framework alternates between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Farzan Memarian , Wonjoon Goo , Rudolf Lioutikov , Scott Niekum , Ufuk Topcu

Many practical applications of reinforcement learning require agents to learn from sparse and delayed rewards. It challenges the ability of agents to attribute their actions to future outcomes. In this paper, we consider the problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-18 Zhizhou Ren , Ruihan Guo , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng

Exploration under sparse reward is a long-standing challenge of model-free reinforcement learning. The state-of-the-art methods address this challenge by introducing intrinsic rewards to encourage exploration in novel states or uncertain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-05 Daochen Zha , Wenye Ma , Lei Yuan , Xia Hu , Ji Liu

Integration of reinforcement learning and imitation learning is an important problem that has been studied for a long time in the field of intelligent robotics. Reinforcement learning optimizes policies to maximize the cumulative reward,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Akira Kinose , Tadahiro Taniguchi

This paper proposes an assembly sequence planning framework, named Subassembly to Assembly (S2A). The framework is designed to enable a robotic manipulator to assemble multiple parts in a prespecified structure by leveraging object…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Chang Shu , Anton Kim , Shinkyu Park