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As machine learning models become more capable, they have exhibited increased potential in solving complex tasks. One of the most promising directions uses deep reinforcement learning to train autonomous agents in computer network defense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Elizabeth Bates , Vasilios Mavroudis , Chris Hicks

Reward shaping is one of the most effective methods to tackle the crucial yet challenging problem of credit assignment in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, designing shaping functions usually requires much expert knowledge and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-29 Haosheng Zou , Tongzheng Ren , Dong Yan , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

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

Many continuous control problems can be formulated as sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. In principle, online RL methods can automatically explore the state space to solve each new task. However, discovering sequences of…

In recent years Landmark Complexes have been successfully employed for localization-free and metric-free autonomous exploration using a group of sensing-limited and communication-limited robots in a GPS-denied environment. To ensure rapid…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Xiatao Sun , Yuwei Wu , Subhrajit Bhattacharya , Vijay Kumar

This paper addresses the challenge of navigation in large, visually complex environments with sparse rewards. We propose a method that uses object-oriented macro actions grounded in a topological map, allowing a simple Deep Q-Network (DQN)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Simon Hakenes , Tobias Glasmachers

Reward shaping is an effective technique for incorporating domain knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as potential-based reward shaping normally make full use of a given shaping reward function. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-06 Yujing Hu , Weixun Wang , Hangtian Jia , Yixiang Wang , Yingfeng Chen , Jianye Hao , Feng Wu , Changjie Fan

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

Rewards play an essential role in reinforcement learning. In contrast to rule-based game environments with well-defined reward functions, complex real-world robotic applications, such as contact-rich manipulation, lack explicit and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-30 Yuning Wu , Jieliang Luo , Hui Li

Artificial Intelligence has been used to help human complete difficult tasks in complicated environments by providing optimized strategies for decision-making or replacing the manual labour. In environments including multiple agents, such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-24 Chaoyi Gu , Varuna De Silva , Corentin Artaud , Rafael Pina

Reinforcement learning (RL) relies heavily on exploration to learn from its environment and maximize observed rewards. Therefore, it is essential to design a reward function that guarantees optimal learning from the received experience.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Ingy ElSayed-Aly , Lu Feng

Reinforcement learning provides an automated framework for learning behaviors from high-level reward specifications, but in practice the choice of reward function can be crucial for good results -- while in principle the reward only needs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Abhishek Gupta , Aldo Pacchiano , Yuexiang Zhai , Sham M. Kakade , Sergey Levine

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

Current reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) pipelines for large language model (LLM) alignment typically assign scalar rewards to sequences, using the final token as a surrogate indicator for the quality of the entire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Ryan Koo , Ian Yang , Vipul Raheja , Mingyi Hong , Kwang-Sung Jun , Dongyeop Kang

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 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

Much of the current work on reinforcement learning studies episodic settings, where the agent is reset between trials to an initial state distribution, often with well-shaped reward functions. Non-episodic settings, where the agent must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 John D. Co-Reyes , Suvansh Sanjeev , Glen Berseth , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine

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

Deep reinforcement learning is a technique for solving problems in a variety of environments, ranging from Atari video games to stock trading. This method leverages deep neural network models to make decisions based on observations of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Anthony Dowling

Learning effective policies for sparse objectives is a key challenge in Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). A common approach is to design task-related dense rewards to improve task learnability. While such rewards are easily interpreted,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-12 Hassam Sheikh , Shauharda Khadka , Santiago Miret , Somdeb Majumdar