English
Related papers

Related papers: Unbiased Methods for Multi-Goal Reinforcement Lear…

200 papers

Hierarchical reinforcement learning has been a compelling approach for achieving goal directed behavior over long sequences of actions. However, it has been challenging to implement in realistic or open-ended environments. A main challenge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-22 Arun Ahuja , Kavya Kopparapu , Rob Fergus , Ishita Dasgupta

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved many impressive results in recent years. However, tasks with sparse rewards or long horizons continue to pose significant challenges. To tackle these important problems, we propose a general…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-04-12 Carlos Florensa , Yan Duan , Pieter Abbeel

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms allow for agents to learn new behaviors from small amounts of experience, mitigating the sample inefficiency problem in RL. However, while meta-RL agents can adapt quickly to new tasks at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Michael Wan , Jian Peng , Tanmay Gangwani

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

Solving tasks with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in reinforcement learning. In the single-agent setting, this challenge is addressed by introducing intrinsic rewards that motivate agents to explore unseen regions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

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

Training LLMs as interactive agents for multi-turn decision-making remains challenging, particularly in long-horizon tasks with sparse and delayed rewards, where agents must execute extended sequences of actions before receiving meaningful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jiangweizhi Peng , Yuanxin Liu , Ruida Zhou , Charles Fleming , Zhaoran Wang , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

In goal-conditioned hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL), a high-level policy specifies a subgoal for the low-level policy to reach. Effective HRL hinges on a suitable subgoal represen tation function, abstracting state space into…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Vivienne Huiling Wang , Tinghuai Wang , Wenyan Yang , Joni-Kristian Kämäräinen , Joni Pajarinen

Deep Reinforcement Learning has been shown to be very successful in complex games, e.g. Atari or Go. These games have clearly defined rules, and hence allow simulation. In many practical applications, however, interactions with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-12 Andreas Merentitis , Kashif Rasul , Roland Vollgraf , Abdul-Saboor Sheikh , Urs Bergmann

Episodic rewards present a significant challenge in reinforcement learning. While intrinsic reward methods have demonstrated effectiveness in single-agent rein-forcement learning scenarios, their application to multi-agent reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Kesheng Chen , Wenjian Luo , Bang Zhang , Zeping Yin , Zipeng Ye

Learning complex tasks from scratch is challenging and often impossible for humans as well as for artificial agents. A curriculum can be used instead, which decomposes a complex task (target task) into a sequence of source tasks (the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-24 Binyamin Manela , Armin Biess

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

Applying reinforcement learning (RL) to sparse reward domains is notoriously challenging due to insufficient guiding signals. Common RL techniques for addressing such domains include (1) learning from demonstrations and (2) curriculum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-29 Vaibhav Bajaj , Guni Sharon , Peter Stone

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

AlphaZero-like Monte Carlo Tree Search systems, originally introduced for two-player games, dynamically balance exploration and exploitation using neural network guidance. This combination makes them also suitable for classical search…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Alexandros Vazaios , Jannis Brugger , Cedric Derstroff , Kristian Kersting , Mira Mezini

Designing suitable reward functions for numerous interacting intelligent agents is challenging in real-world applications. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) in mean field games (MFGs) offers a practical framework to infer reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Yang Chen , Xiao Lin , Bo Yan , Libo Zhang , Jiamou Liu , Neset Özkan Tan , Michael Witbrock

Sparse rewards are a major bottleneck in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where simultaneous learning induces non-stationarity and makes reward design especially delicate. Reward shaping can accelerate learning, but in the…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Elie Abboud , Oren Gal

Reinforcement learning can train LLM agents from sparse task rewards, but long-horizon credit assignment remains challenging: a single success-or-failure signal must be distributed across many actions. Existing methods rely on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Xiaozhe Li , Tianyi Lyu , Yang Li , Yichuan Ma , Peiji Li , Linyang Li , Qipeng Guo , Dahua Lin , Kai Chen

Static feature exclusion strategies often fail to prevent bias when hidden dependencies influence the model predictions. To address this issue, we explore a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that integrates bias mitigation and automated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Sudip Khadka , L. S. Paudel

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