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Effective reinforcement learning (RL) for complex stochastic systems requires leveraging historical data collected in previous iterations to accelerate policy optimization. Classical experience replay treats all past observations uniformly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-06 Hua Zheng , Wei Xie , M. Ben Feng , Keilung Choy

Experience replay is a key component in reinforcement learning for stabilizing learning and improving sample efficiency. Its typical implementation samples transitions with replacement from a replay buffer. In contrast, in supervised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Yasuhiro Fujita

Reward shaping is a technique in reinforcement learning that addresses the sparse-reward problem by providing more frequent and informative rewards. We introduce a self-adaptive and highly efficient reward shaping mechanism that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Haozhe Ma , Zhengding Luo , Thanh Vinh Vo , Kuankuan Sima , Tze-Yun Leong

Reinforcement Learning(RL) with sparse rewards is a major challenge. We propose \emph{Hindsight Trust Region Policy Optimization}(HTRPO), a new RL algorithm that extends the highly successful TRPO algorithm with \emph{hindsight} to tackle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Hanbo Zhang , Site Bai , Xuguang Lan , David Hsu , Nanning Zheng

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems typically optimize scalar reward functions that assume precise and reliable evaluation of outcomes. However, real-world objectives--especially those derived from human preferences--are often uncertain,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Disha Singha

Reinforcement Learning algorithms aim to learn optimal control strategies through iterative interactions with an environment. A critical element in this process is the experience replay buffer, which stores past experiences, allowing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Hoda Yamani , Yuning Xing , Lee Violet C. Ong , Bruce A. MacDonald , Henry Williams

Back-stepping experience replay (BER) is a reinforcement learning technique that can accelerate learning efficiency in reversible environments. BER trains an agent with generated back-stepping transitions of collected experiences and normal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Guwen Lyu , Masahiro Sato

Solving goal-oriented tasks is an important but challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL). For such tasks, the rewards are often sparse, making it difficult to learn a policy effectively. To tackle this difficulty, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-04 Hao Sun , Zhizhong Li , Xiaotong Liu , Dahua Lin , Bolei Zhou

Experience replay (ER) is a crucial component of many deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems. However, uniform sampling from an ER buffer can lead to slow convergence and unstable asymptotic behaviors. This paper introduces Stratified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Varun Kompella , Thomas J. Walsh , Samuel Barrett , Peter Wurman , Peter Stone

Experience replay, which enables the agents to remember and reuse experience from the past, has played a significant role in the success of off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). To utilize the experience replay efficiently, the existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-08 Youngmin Oh , Kimin Lee , Jinwoo Shin , Eunho Yang , Sung Ju Hwang

Many reinforcement-learning researchers treat the reward function as a part of the environment, meaning that the agent can only know the reward of a state if it encounters that state in a trial run. However, we argue that this is an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-18 Eli Friedman , Fred Fontaine

Reinforcement learning methods have been used for learning dialogue policies. However, learning an effective dialogue policy frequently requires prohibitively many conversations. This is partly because of the sparse rewards in dialogues,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-11-26 Keting Lu , Shiqi Zhang , Xiaoping Chen

In continual learning, the learner faces a stream of data whose distribution changes over time. Modern neural networks are known to suffer under this setting, as they quickly forget previously acquired knowledge. To address such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-03 Arslan Chaudhry , Albert Gordo , Puneet K. Dokania , Philip Torr , David Lopez-Paz

In dynamic wireless environments, accurate channel state information (CSI) prediction remains challenging due to non-stationary fading, mobility. This paper proposes an Uncertainty-Weighted Experience Replay (UW-ER) framework that…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-16 Muhammad Jazib Qamar , Muhammad Hamza Nawaz , Messaoud Ahmed Ouameur , Ayesha Mohsin , Miloud Bagaa

Dealing with sparse rewards is a longstanding challenge in reinforcement learning. The recent use of hindsight methods have achieved success on a variety of sparse-reward tasks, but they fail on complex tasks such as stacking multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 John B. Lanier , Stephen McAleer , Pierre Baldi

This paper presents a benchmarking study of some of the state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms used for solving two simulated vision-based robotics problems. The algorithms considered in this study include soft actor-critic…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-01-13 Swagat Kumar , Hayden Sampson , Ardhendu Behera

In the search for more sample-efficient reinforcement-learning (RL) algorithms, a promising direction is to leverage as much external off-policy data as possible. For instance, expert demonstrations. In the past, multiple ideas have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Jesus Bujalance Martin , Fabien Moutarde

Several algorithms have been proposed to sample non-uniformly the replay buffer of deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents to speed-up learning, but very few theoretical foundations of these sampling schemes have been provided. Among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-15 Thibault Lahire , Matthieu Geist , Emmanuel Rachelson

The utilization of the experience replay mechanism enables agents to effectively leverage their experiences on several occasions. In previous studies, the sampling probability of the transitions was modified based on their relative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Arda Sarp Yenicesu , Furkan B. Mutlu , Suleyman S. Kozat , Ozgur S. Oguz

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