English
Related papers

Related papers: Online reinforcement learning with sparse rewards …

200 papers

While recent progress in deep reinforcement learning has enabled robots to learn complex behaviors, tasks with long horizons and sparse rewards remain an ongoing challenge. In this work, we propose an effective reward shaping method through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Xingyu Lu , Stas Tiomkin , Pieter Abbeel

Sparse-reward domains are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms since significant exploration is needed before encountering reward for the first time. Hierarchical reinforcement learning can facilitate exploration by reducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-13 Lorenzo Steccanella , Simone Totaro , Damien Allonsius , Anders Jonsson

Autonomous vehicles inevitably encounter a vast array of scenarios in real-world environments. Addressing long-tail scenarios, particularly those involving intensive interactions with numerous traffic participants, remains one of the most…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-16 Guanzhou Li , Jianping Wu , Yujing He

Offline Reinforcement Learning (ORL) enablesus to separately study the two interlinked processes of reinforcement learning: collecting informative experience and inferring optimal behaviour. The second step has been widely studied in the…

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

Collision avoidance -- involving a rapid threat detection and quick execution of the appropriate evasive maneuver -- is a critical aspect of driving. However, existing models of human collision avoidance behavior are fragmented, focusing on…

In this paper, we develop a recommender system for a game that suggests potential items to players based on their interactive behaviors to maximize revenue for the game provider. Our approach is built on a reinforcement learning-based…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-18 Hung Nguyen , Minh Nguyen , Long Pham , Jennifer Adorno Nieves

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) under sparse rewards remains fundamentally challenging because agents often fail to concentrate their influence, leading to insufficiently coordinated exploration. To address this, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yisak Park , Sunwoo Lee , Seungyul Han

Reward engineering and designing an incentive reward function are non-trivial tasks to train agents in complex environments. Furthermore, an inaccurate reward function may lead to a biased behaviour which is far from an efficient and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-05-04 Saeed Tafazzol , Erfan Fathi , Mahdi Rezaei , Ehsan Asali

The development of autonomous agents for complex, long-horizon tasks is a central goal in AI. However, dominant training paradigms face a critical limitation: reinforcement learning (RL) methods that optimize solely for final task success…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Zijing Zhang , Ziyang Chen , Mingxiao Li , Zhaopeng Tu , Xiaolong Li

Nowadays, model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have achieved remarkable performance on many decision making and control tasks, but high sample complexity and low sample efficiency still hinder the wide use of model-free…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Jingbin Liu , Xinyang Gu , Shuai Liu

All reinforcement learning algorithms must handle the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Many state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning methods use noise in the action selection, such as Gaussian noise in policy gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-05 Trevor Barron , Oliver Obst , Heni Ben Amor

Reinforcement learning algorithms describe how an agent can learn an optimal action policy in a sequential decision process, through repeated experience. In a given environment, the agent policy provides him some running and terminal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-03-24 Arthur Charpentier , Romuald Elie , Carl Remlinger

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

Inspired by the concept of active learning, we propose active inference$\unicode{x2013}$a methodology for statistical inference with machine-learning-assisted data collection. Assuming a budget on the number of labels that can be collected,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-09 Tijana Zrnic , Emmanuel J. Candès

Reward machines are an established tool for dealing with reinforcement learning problems in which rewards are sparse and depend on complex sequences of actions. However, existing algorithms for learning reward machines assume an overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jan Corazza , Ivan Gavran , Daniel Neider

We propose an approach to learning agents for active robotic mapping, where the goal is to map the environment as quickly as possible. The agent learns to map efficiently in simulated environments by receiving rewards corresponding to how…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-01-01 Shane Barratt

Artificial intelligence is commonly defined as the ability to achieve goals in the world. In the reinforcement learning framework, goals are encoded as reward functions that guide agent behaviour, and the sum of observed rewards provide a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-26 Marlos C. Machado , Michael Bowling

Active inference is a Bayesian framework for understanding biological intelligence. The underlying theory brings together perception and action under one single imperative: minimizing free energy. However, despite its theoretical utility in…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2020-10-23 Zafeirios Fountas , Noor Sajid , Pedro A. M. Mediano , Karl Friston

Deep reinforcement learning agents have achieved state-of-the-art results by directly maximising cumulative reward. However, environments contain a much wider variety of possible training signals. In this paper, we introduce an agent that…