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Actor critic methods with sparse rewards in model-based deep reinforcement learning typically require a deterministic binary reward function that reflects only two possible outcomes: if, for each step, the goal has been achieved or not. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Juan Vargas , Lazar Andjelic , Amir Barati Farimani

In safe reinforcement learning (RL), auxiliary safety costs are used to align the agent to safe decision making. In practice, safety constraints, including cost functions and budgets, are unknown or hard to specify, as it requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Siow Meng Low , Akshat Kumar

Deep neural policies have recently been installed in a diverse range of settings, from biotechnology to automated financial systems. However, the utilization of deep neural networks to approximate the value function leads to concerns on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Ezgi Korkmaz

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

Temporal credit assignment is crucial for learning and skill development in natural and artificial intelligence. While computational methods like the TD approach in reinforcement learning have been proposed, it's unclear if they accurately…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Thuy Ngoc Nguyen , Chase McDonald , Cleotilde Gonzalez

Deep reinforcement learning has obtained significant breakthroughs in recent years. Most methods in deep-RL achieve good results via the maximization of the reward signal provided by the environment, typically in the form of discounted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-10 Yubin Deng , Ke Yu , Dahua Lin , Xiaoou Tang , Chen Change Loy

Recent advancements in reinforcement learning have made significant impacts across various domains, yet they often struggle in complex multi-agent environments due to issues like algorithm instability, low sampling efficiency, and the…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Cheng Xu , Changtian Zhang , Yuchen Shi , Ran Wang , Shihong Duan , Yadong Wan , Xiaotong Zhang

Going from research to production, especially for large and complex software systems, is fundamentally a hard problem. In large-scale game production, one of the main reasons is that the development environment can be very different from…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2023-07-24 Jonas Gillberg , Joakim Bergdahl , Alessandro Sestini , Andrew Eakins , Linus Gisslen

Achieving fast and stable off-policy learning in deep reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging. Most existing methods rely on semi-gradient temporal-difference (TD) methods for their simplicity and efficiency, but are consequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Esraa Elelimy , Brett Daley , Andrew Patterson , Marlos C. Machado , Adam White , Martha White

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for tackling control problems, but its practical application is often hindered by the complexity arising from intricate reward functions with multiple terms. The reward hypothesis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Kilian Freitag , Kristian Ceder , Rita Laezza , Knut Åkesson , Morteza Haghir Chehreghani

In multi-goal reinforcement learning (RL) settings, the reward for each goal is sparse, and located in a small neighborhood of the goal. In large dimension, the probability of reaching a reward vanishes and the agent receives little…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-17 Léonard Blier , Yann Ollivier

This study presents a benchmark for evaluating action-constrained reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. In action-constrained RL, each action taken by the learning system must comply with certain constraints. These constraints are crucial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-30 Kazumi Kasaura , Shuwa Miura , Tadashi Kozuno , Ryo Yonetani , Kenta Hoshino , Yohei Hosoe

The temporal Credit Assignment Problem (CAP) is a well-known and challenging task in AI. While Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially Deep RL, works well when immediate rewards are available, it can fail when only delayed rewards are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-04 Markel Sanz Ausin , Hamoon Azizsoltani , Song Ju , Yeo Jin Kim , Min Chi

We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Nadav Merlis

In a reinforcement learning (RL) setting, the agent's optimal strategy heavily depends on her risk preferences and the underlying model dynamics of the training environment. These two aspects influence the agent's ability to make…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Anthony Coache , Sebastian Jaimungal

This work identifies a common flaw of deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms: a tendency to rely on early interactions and ignore useful evidence encountered later. Because of training on progressively growing datasets, deep RL agents…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Evgenii Nikishin , Max Schwarzer , Pierluca D'Oro , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Aaron Courville

Deep reinforcement learning agents are often misaligned, as they over-exploit early reward signals. Recently, several symbolic approaches have addressed these challenges by encoding sparse objectives along with aligned plans. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Zihan Ye , Phil Chau , Raban Emunds , Jannis Blüml , Cedric Derstroff , Quentin Delfosse , Oleg Arenz , Kristian Kersting

Curriculum reinforcement learning (CRL) improves the learning speed and stability of an agent by exposing it to a tailored series of tasks throughout learning. Despite empirical successes, an open question in CRL is how to automatically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Pascal Klink , Carlo D'Eramo , Jan Peters , Joni Pajarinen

This article is a gentle discussion about the field of reinforcement learning in practice, about opportunities and challenges, touching a broad range of topics, with perspectives and without technical details. The article is based on both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Yuxi Li

In deep Reinforcement Learning (RL), value functions are typically approximated using deep neural networks and trained via mean squared error regression objectives to fit the true value functions. Recent research has proposed an alternative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Denis Tarasov , Kirill Brilliantov , Dmitrii Kharlapenko