Related papers: Dealing with Sparse Rewards in Continuous Control …
We propose an algorithm for deterministic continuous Markov Decision Processes with sparse rewards that computes the optimal policy exactly with no dependency on the size of the state space. The algorithm has time complexity of $O( |R|^3…
Safety in goal directed Reinforcement Learning (RL) settings has typically been handled through constraints over trajectories and have demonstrated good performance in primarily short horizon tasks. In this paper, we are specifically…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…
Despite its popularity in the reinforcement learning community, a provably convergent policy gradient method for continuous space-time control problems with nonlinear state dynamics has been elusive. This paper proposes proximal gradient…
In constrained reinforcement learning (C-RL), an agent seeks to learn from the environment a policy that maximizes the expected cumulative reward while satisfying minimum requirements in secondary cumulative reward constraints. Several…
Several challenges make it difficult for sparse neural networks to compete with dense models. First, setting a large fraction of weights to zero impairs forward and gradient signal propagation. Second, sparse studies often need to test…
Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…
Reward sparsity in long-horizon reinforcement learning (RL) tasks remains a significant challenge, while existing outcome-based reward shaping struggles to define meaningful immediate rewards without introducing bias or requiring explicit…
Direct alignment algorithms have proven an effective step for aligning language models to human-desired behaviors. Current variants of the Direct Preference Optimization objective have focused on a strict setting where all tokens are…
Stochastic first-order methods are standard for training large-scale machine learning models. Random behavior may cause a particular run of an algorithm to result in a highly suboptimal objective value, whereas theoretical guarantees are…
Efficient and effective learning is one of the ultimate goals of the deep reinforcement learning (DRL), although the compromise has been made in most of the time, especially for the application of robot manipulations. Learning is always…
Identifying homogeneous subgroups of variables can be challenging in high dimensional data analysis with highly correlated predictors. We propose a new method called Hexagonal Operator for Regression with Shrinkage and Equality Selection,…
We propose a novel hybrid stochastic policy gradient estimator by combining an unbiased policy gradient estimator, the REINFORCE estimator, with another biased one, an adapted SARAH estimator for policy optimization. The hybrid policy…
Long-horizon precision manipulation in laboratory automation, such as pipette tip attachment and liquid transfer, requires policies that respect strict procedural logic while operating in continuous, high-dimensional state spaces. However,…
We study the distributed stochastic optimization (DSO) problem under a heavy-tailed noise condition by utilizing a multi-agent system. Despite the extensive research on DSO algorithms used to solve DSO problems under light-tailed noise…
Recent advances in constrained reinforcement learning (RL) have endowed reinforcement learning with certain safety guarantees. However, deploying existing constrained RL algorithms in continuous control tasks with general hard constraints…
Reinforcement learning (RL)-based quadrotor control policies have achieved impressive performance in tasks such as fast navigation in cluttered environments and drone racing, where the focus is on speed and agility. However, in several…
We address the application of stochastic optimization methods for the simultaneous control of parameter-dependent systems. In particular, we focus on the classical Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) approach of Robbins and Monro, and on the…
It has been a recent trend to leverage the power of supervised learning (SL) towards more effective reinforcement learning (RL) methods. We propose a novel phasic approach by alternating online RL and offline SL for tackling sparse-reward…
Data characterized by high dimensionality and sparsity are commonly used to describe real-world node interactions. Low-rank representation (LR) can map high-dimensional sparse (HDS) data to low-dimensional feature spaces and infer node…