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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…

Learning with sparse rewards remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), especially when the aim is to train a policy capable of achieving multiple different goals. To date, the most successful approaches for dealing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Henry Charlesworth , Giovanni Montana

In order to provide adaptive and user-friendly solutions to robotic manipulation, it is important that the agent can learn to accomplish tasks even if they are only provided with very sparse instruction signals. To address the issues…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Siyu Dai , Wei Xu , Andreas Hofmann , Brian Williams

Successfully navigating a complex environment to obtain a desired outcome is a difficult task, that up to recently was believed to be capable only by humans. This perception has been broken down over time, especially with the introduction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Joshua Hare

The problem of sparse rewards is one of the hardest challenges in contemporary reinforcement learning. Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) tackles this problem by using a set of temporally-extended actions, or options, each of which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-14 Nat Dilokthanakul , Christos Kaplanis , Nick Pawlowski , Murray Shanahan

Maze navigation is a fundamental challenge in robotics, requiring agents to traverse complex environments efficiently. While the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm excels in control tasks, its performance in maze navigation…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Wenjie Hu , Ye Zhou , Hann Woei Ho

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently proven great success in various domains. Yet, the design of the reward function requires detailed domain expertise and tedious fine-tuning to ensure that agents are able to learn the desired…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Murad Dawood , Nils Dengler , Jorge de Heuvel , Maren Bennewitz

Sparse reward problems are one of the biggest challenges in Reinforcement Learning. Goal-directed tasks are one such sparse reward problems where a reward signal is received only when the goal is reached. One promising way to train an agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Ameet Deshpande , Srikanth Sarma , Ashutosh Jha , Balaraman Ravindran

We study a hybrid conditional gradient - smoothing algorithm (HCGS) for solving composite convex optimization problems which contain several terms over a bounded set. Examples of these include regularization problems with several norms as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-04-16 Andreas Argyriou , Marco Signoretto , Johan Suykens

Reward machines are an established tool for dealing with reinforcement learning problems in which rewards are sparse and depend on complex sequences of actions. However, existing algorithms for learning reward machines assume an overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jan Corazza , Ivan Gavran , Daniel Neider

We present a method for Temporal Difference (TD) learning that addresses several challenges faced by robots learning to navigate in a marine environment. For improved data efficiency, our method reduces TD updates to Gaussian Process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-03 John Martin , Jinkun Wang , Brendan Englot

Deep learning has achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning (RL) problems when dense reward function is provided. However, in sparse reward environment it still often suffers from the need to carefully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Hao Liu , Alexander Trott , Richard Socher , Caiming Xiong

Optimizing with group sparsity is significant in enhancing model interpretability in machining learning applications, e.g., feature selection, compressed sensing and model compression. However, for large-scale stochastic training problems,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-16 Tianyi Chen , Guanyi Wang , Tianyu Ding , Bo Ji , Sheng Yi , Zhihui Zhu

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a promising approach for teaching robots new behaviour. However, one of its main limitations is the need for carefully hand-coded reward signals by an expert. We argue that it is crucial to automate the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-08-09 Abdalkarim Mohtasib , Gerhard Neumann , Heriberto Cuayahuitl

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

The automatic synthesis of policies for robotic-control tasks through reinforcement learning relies on a reward signal that simultaneously captures many possibly conflicting requirements. In this paper, we in\-tro\-duce a novel,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Luigi Berducci , Edgar A. Aguilar , Dejan Ničković , Radu Grosu

We consider deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) in the context of reinforcement learning with sparse rewards. To enhance exploration, we introduce a search procedure, \emph{${\epsilon}{t}$-greedy}, which generates exploratory options…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Ehsan Futuhi , Shayan Karimi , Chao Gao , Martin Müller

Sparse learning is ubiquitous in many machine learning tasks. It aims to regularize the goodness-of-fit objective by adding a penalty term to encode structural constraints on the model parameters. In this paper, we develop a flexible sparse…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-10 Yingjie Wang , Mokhtar Z. Alaya , Salim Bouzebda , Xinsheng Liu

Mastering deep reinforcement learning (DRL) proves challenging in tasks featuring scant rewards. These limited rewards merely signify whether the task is partially or entirely accomplished, necessitating various exploration actions before…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang

Reinforcement learning algorithms such as hindsight experience replay (HER) and hindsight goal generation (HGG) have been able to solve challenging robotic manipulation tasks in multi-goal settings with sparse rewards. HER achieves its…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-07-28 Zhenshan Bing , Matthias Brucker , Fabrice O. Morin , Kai Huang , Alois Knoll