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Learning optimal policies in sparse rewards settings is difficult as the learning agent has little to no feedback on the quality of its actions. In these situations, a good strategy is to focus on exploration, hopefully leading to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Giuseppe Paolo , Miranda Coninx , Alban Laflaquière , Stephane Doncieux

Hierarchical abstraction and curiosity-driven exploration are two common paradigms in current reinforcement learning approaches to break down difficult problems into a sequence of simpler ones and to overcome reward sparsity. However, there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-18 Frank Röder , Manfred Eppe , Phuong D. H. Nguyen , Stefan Wermter

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Simone Parisi , Davide Tateo , Maximilian Hensel , Carlo D'Eramo , Jan Peters , Joni Pajarinen

Multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) is commonly considered to suffer from non-stationary environments and exponentially increasing policy space. It would be even more challenging when rewards are sparse and delayed over long…

Exploration strategy design is one of the challenging problems in reinforcement learning~(RL), especially when the environment contains a large state space or sparse rewards. During exploration, the agent tries to discover novel areas or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-07 Xiao Ma , Shen-Yi Zhao , Wu-Jun Li

In the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, the learning is guided through a reward signal. This means that in situations of sparse rewards the agent has to focus on exploration, in order to discover which action, or set of actions leads…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-03 Giuseppe Paolo

Long-horizon manipulation tasks such as stacking represent a longstanding challenge in the field of robotic manipulation, particularly when using reinforcement learning (RL) methods which often struggle to learn the correct sequence of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Jing Zhang , Emmanuel Dean , Karinne Ramirez-Amaro

This paper introduces a novel method of adding intrinsic bonuses to task-oriented reward function in order to efficiently facilitate reinforcement learning search. While various bonuses have been designed to date, they are analogous to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Taisuke Kobayashi

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) frameworks like Option-Critic (OC) and Multi-updates Option Critic (MOC) have introduced significant advancements in learning reusable options. However, these methods underperform in multi-goal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Gabriel Romio , Mateus Begnini Melchiades , Bruno Castro da Silva , Gabriel de Oliveira Ramos

We study how to effectively leverage expert feedback to learn sequential decision-making policies. We focus on problems with sparse rewards and long time horizons, which typically pose significant challenges in reinforcement learning. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-12 Hoang M. Le , Nan Jiang , Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudík , Yisong Yue , Hal Daumé

This paper studies reward-agnostic exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) -- a scenario where the learner is unware of the reward functions during the exploration stage -- and designs an algorithm that improves over the state of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Gen Li , Yuling Yan , Yuxin Chen , Jianqing Fan

Intrinsic reward shaping has emerged as a prevalent approach to solving hard-exploration and sparse-rewards environments in reinforcement learning (RL). While single intrinsic rewards, such as curiosity-driven or novelty-based methods, have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Mingqi Yuan , Bo Li , Xin Jin , Wenjun Zeng

We provide a framework for accelerating reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms by heuristics constructed from domain knowledge or offline data. Tabula rasa RL algorithms require environment interactions or computation that scales with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Ching-An Cheng , Andrey Kolobov , Adith Swaminathan

Goal-conditioned hierarchical reinforcement learning (GCHRL) provides a promising approach to solving long-horizon tasks. Recently, its success has been extended to more general settings by concurrently learning hierarchical policies and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Siyuan Li , Jin Zhang , Jianhao Wang , Yang Yu , Chongjie Zhang

Practising and honing skills forms a fundamental component of how humans learn, yet artificial agents are rarely specifically trained to perform them. Instead, they are usually trained end-to-end, with the hope being that useful skills will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-17 Michael Matthews , Mikayel Samvelyan , Jack Parker-Holder , Edward Grefenstette , Tim Rocktäschel

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) has made notable progress in complex control tasks by leveraging temporal abstraction. However, previous HRL algorithms often suffer from serious data inefficiency as environments get large. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Seungjae Lee , Jigang Kim , Inkyu Jang , H. Jin Kim

Complex sequential tasks in continuous-control settings often require agents to successfully traverse a set of "narrow passages" in their state space. Solving such tasks with a sparse reward in a sample-efficient manner poses a challenge to…

Decision-making in complex, continuous multi-task environments is often hindered by the difficulty of obtaining accurate models for planning and the inefficiency of learning purely from trial and error. While precise environment dynamics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Jeff Jewett , Sandhya Saisubramanian

Despite the significant success at enabling robots with autonomous behaviors makes deep reinforcement learning a promising approach for robotic object search task, the deep reinforcement learning approach severely suffers from the nature…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-04 Xin Ye , Yezhou Yang

Exploration and reward specification are fundamental and intertwined challenges for reinforcement learning. Solving sequential decision-making tasks requiring expansive exploration requires either careful design of reward functions or the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Marcel Torne , Max Balsells , Zihan Wang , Samedh Desai , Tao Chen , Pulkit Agrawal , Abhishek Gupta