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One of the central challenges faced by a reinforcement learning (RL) agent is to effectively learn a (near-)optimal policy in environments with large state spaces having sparse and noisy feedback signals. In real-world applications, an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Rati Devidze , Volkan Cevher , Adish Singla

Recent progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) and computer vision enables artificial agents to solve complex tasks, including locomotion, manipulation and video games from high-dimensional pixel observations. However, domain specific…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Ruihan Zhao , Ufuk Topcu , Sandeep Chinchali , Mariano Phielipp

We present a map-less path planning algorithm based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for mobile robots navigating in unknown environment that only relies on 40-dimensional raw laser data and odometry information. The planner is trained…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-02-12 Nicolò Botteghi , Beril Sirmacek , Khaled A. A. Mustafa , Mannes Poel , Stefano Stramigioli

Reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in sparse reward settings, often requires prohibitively large numbers of interactions with the environment, thereby limiting its applicability to complex problems. To address this, several prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Prasoon Goyal , Scott Niekum , Raymond J. Mooney

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) has proven to be a successful framework for leveraging experience from prior tasks to rapidly learn new related tasks, however, current meta-RL approaches struggle to learn in sparse reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-12-03 Charles Packer , Pieter Abbeel , Joseph E. Gonzalez

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

Rewards play a crucial role in reinforcement learning. To arrive at the desired policy, the design of a suitable reward function often requires significant domain expertise as well as trial-and-error. Here, we aim to minimize the effort…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-18 Zheng Wu , Wenzhao Lian , Vaibhav Unhelkar , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Stefan Schaal

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their selection of actions to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Temporal Difference (TD) Learning -- a model-free RL method -- is a leading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

In reinforcement learning (RL), sparse rewards are a natural way to specify the task to be learned. However, most RL algorithms struggle to learn in this setting since the learning signal is mostly zeros. In contrast, humans are good at…

While reinforcement learning (RL) has been successful in natural language processing (NLP) domains such as dialogue generation and text-based games, it typically faces the problem of sparse rewards that leads to slow or no convergence.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Ameet Deshpande , Eve Fleisig

Designing dense rewards is crucial for reinforcement learning (RL), yet in robotics it often demands extensive manual effort and lacks scalability. One promising solution is to view task progress as a dense reward signal, as it quantifies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Yuyang Liu , Chuan Wen , Yihang Hu , Dinesh Jayaraman , Yang Gao

This paper presents a new reward function that can be used for deep reinforcement learning in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) control and navigation problems. The reward function is based on the construction and estimation of the time of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-07-20 Mikhail S. Tovarnov , Nikita V. Bykov

One major limitation to the applicability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to many practical domains is the large number of samples required to learn an optimal policy. To address this problem and improve learning efficiency, we consider a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-07 Roberto Cipollone , Giuseppe De Giacomo , Marco Favorito , Luca Iocchi , Fabio Patrizi

In this paper we consider reinforcement learning tasks with progressive rewards; that is, tasks where the rewards tend to increase in magnitude over time. We hypothesise that this property may be problematic for value-based deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-30 Michael Dann , John Thangarajah

In this paper, we study the application of DRL algorithms in the context of local navigation problems, in which a robot moves towards a goal location in unknown and cluttered workspaces equipped only with limited-range exteroceptive…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Victor R. F. Miranda , Armando A. Neto , Gustavo M. Freitas , Leonardo A. Mozelli

This paper presents a reinforcement learning framework that incorporates a Contextual Reward Machine for task-oriented grasping. The Contextual Reward Machine reduces task complexity by decomposing grasping tasks into manageable sub-tasks.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Hui Li , Akhlak Uz Zaman , Fujian Yan , Hongsheng He

Statistical spoken dialogue systems have the attractive property of being able to be optimised from data via interactions with real users. However in the reinforcement learning paradigm the dialogue manager (agent) often requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-08-19 Pei-Hao Su , David Vandyke , Milica Gasic , Nikola Mrksic , Tsung-Hsien Wen , Steve Young

Reinforcement learning often suffer from the sparse reward issue in real-world robotics problems. Learning from demonstration (LfD) is an effective way to eliminate this problem, which leverages collected expert data to aid online learning.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Yanjiang Guo , Jingyue Gao , Zheng Wu , Chengming Shi , Jianyu Chen

Safe and efficient crowd navigation for mobile robot is a crucial yet challenging task. Previous work has shown the power of deep reinforcement learning frameworks to train efficient policies. However, their performance deteriorates when…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-09-24 Yuying Chen , Congcong Liu , Ming Liu , Bertram E. Shi

Intelligent agents must pursue their goals in complex environments with partial information and often limited computational capacity. Reinforcement learning methods have achieved great success by creating agents that optimize engineered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Alejandro Daniel Noel , Charel van Hoof , Beren Millidge