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Related papers: HAC Explore: Accelerating Exploration with Hierarc…

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While apprenticeship learning has shown promise for inducing effective pedagogical policies directly from student interactions in e-learning environments, most existing approaches rely on optimal or near-optimal expert demonstrations under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Md Mirajul Islam , Rajesh Debnath , Adittya Soukarjya Saha , Min Chi

Efficient exploration in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a challenging problem when receiving only a team reward, especially in environments with sparse rewards. A powerful method to mitigate this issue involves crafting dense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Xuefei Wu , Xiao Yin , Yuanyang Zhu , Chunlin Chen

In many learning settings, it is beneficial to augment the main features with pairwise interactions. Such interaction models can be often enhanced by performing variable selection under the so-called strong hierarchy constraint: an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-15 Hussein Hazimeh , Rahul Mazumder

Reinforcement Learning (RL) struggles in problems with delayed rewards, and one approach is to segment the task into sub-tasks with incremental rewards. We propose a framework called Hierarchical Inverse Reinforcement Learning (HIRL), which…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-04-25 Sanjay Krishnan , Animesh Garg , Richard Liaw , Lauren Miller , Florian T. Pokorny , Ken Goldberg

Reinforcement learning has been successful in many tasks ranging from robotic control, games, energy management etc. In complex real world environments with sparse rewards and long task horizons, sample efficiency is still a major…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-10-12 Bharat Prakash , Nicholas Waytowich , Tim Oates , Tinoosh Mohsenin

The challenges inherent in long-horizon tasks in robotics persist due to the typical inefficient exploration and sparse rewards in traditional reinforcement learning approaches. To address these challenges, we have developed a novel…

Recent studies have shown that episodic reinforcement learning (RL) is no harder than bandits when the total reward is bounded by $1$, and proved regret bounds that have a polylogarithmic dependence on the planning horizon $H$. However, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Kaixuan Ji , Qingyue Zhao , Jiafan He , Weitong Zhang , Quanquan Gu

Imitation learning is an effective alternative approach to learn a policy when the reward function is sparse. In this paper, we consider a challenging setting where an agent and an expert use different actions from each other. We assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Konrad Zolna , Negar Rostamzadeh , Yoshua Bengio , Sungjin Ahn , Pedro O. Pinheiro

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as curriculum learning and Go-Explore often rely on hand-crafted heuristics, while curiosity-driven…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Georgios Sotirchos , Zlatan Ajanović , Jens Kober

Existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods struggle with long-horizon robotic manipulation tasks, particularly those involving sparse rewards. While action chunking is a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation, using RL to directly…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Jiarui Yang , Bin Zhu , Jingjing Chen , Yu-Gang Jiang

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

Reinforcement learning usually uses the feedback rewards of environmental to train agents. But the rewards in the actual environment are sparse, and even some environments will not rewards. Most of the current methods are difficult to get…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-13 Kai Jiang , XiaoLong Qin

Multi-goal reinforcement learning (RL) aims to qualify the agent to accomplish multi-goal tasks, which is of great importance in learning scalable robotic manipulation skills. However, reward engineering always requires strenuous efforts in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Deyu Yang , Hanbo Zhang , Xuguang Lan , Jishiyu Ding

Exploration remains a critical challenge in online reinforcement learning, as an agent must effectively explore unknown environments to achieve high returns. Currently, the main exploration algorithms are primarily count-based methods and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Zhirui Fang , Kai Yang , Jian Tao , Jiafei Lyu , Lusong Li , Li Shen , Xiu Li

Training a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) model with a sparse reward is generally difficult because numerous combinations of interactions among agents induce a certain outcome (i.e., success or failure). Earlier studies have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Heechang Ryu , Hayong Shin , Jinkyoo Park

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) has seen widespread interest as an approach to tractable learning of complex modular behaviors. However, existing work either assume access to expert-constructed hierarchies, or use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Kurtland Chua , Qi Lei , Jason D. Lee

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

In recent years, a number of reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been proposed to explore complex environments which differ across episodes. In this work, we show that the effectiveness of these methods critically relies on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-06 Mikael Henaff , Roberta Raileanu , Minqi Jiang , Tim Rocktäschel

General purpose agents will require large repertoires of skills. Empowerment -- the maximum mutual information between skills and states -- provides a pathway for learning large collections of distinct skills, but mutual information is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Andrew Levy , Sreehari Rammohan , Alessandro Allievi , Scott Niekum , George Konidaris

Long-horizon tasks in robotic manipulation present significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) due to the difficulty of designing dense reward functions and effectively exploring the expansive state-action space. However, despite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Adrià López Escoriza , Nicklas Hansen , Stone Tao , Tongzhou Mu , Hao Su