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The main challenge in developing effective reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines is often the design and tuning the reward functions. Well-designed shaping reward can lead to significantly faster learning. Naively formulated rewards,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-20 Se Hwan Jeon , Steve Heim , Charles Khazoom , Sangbae Kim

Teaching agents to follow complex written instructions has been an important yet elusive goal. One technique for enhancing learning efficiency is language reward shaping (LRS). Within a reinforcement learning (RL) framework, LRS involves…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Sukai Huang , Nir Lipovetzky , Trevor Cohn

Reward shaping has been applied widely to accelerate Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents' training. However, a principled way of designing effective reward shaping functions, especially for complex continuous control problems, remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Mateo Juliani , Mingxuan Li , Elias Bareinboim

Model-predictive-control (MPC) offers an optimal control technique to establish and ensure that the total operation cost of multi-energy systems remains at a minimum while fulfilling all system constraints. However, this method presumes an…

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

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

We propose a general and model-free approach for Reinforcement Learning (RL) on real robotics with sparse rewards. We build upon the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm to use demonstrations. Both demonstrations and actual…

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

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective approach to motion planning in autonomous driving, where an optimal driving policy can be automatically learned using the interaction data with the environment. Nevertheless, the reward function…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-28 Lin-Chi Wu , Zengjie Zhang , Sofie Haesaert , Zhiqiang Ma , Zhiyong Sun

The application of reinforcement learning (RL) in robotic control is still limited in the environments with sparse and delayed rewards. In this paper, we propose a practical self-imitation learning method named Self-Imitation Learning with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-26 Zhixin Chen , Mengxiang Lin

Solving tasks with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in reinforcement learning. In the single-agent setting, this challenge is addressed by introducing intrinsic rewards that motivate agents to explore unseen regions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

Sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) remains fundamentally hard: without structure, any agent needs $\Omega(|\mathcal{S}||\mathcal{A}|/p)$ samples to recover rewards. We introduce Policy-Aware Matrix Completion (PAMC) as a first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Ibne Farabi Shihab , Sanjeda Akter , Anuj Sharma

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents continually interact with the environment and use the feedback to refine their behavior. To guide policy optimization, reward models are introduced as proxies of the desired objectives, such that when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Rui Yu , Shenghua Wan , Yucen Wang , Chen-Xiao Gao , Le Gan , Zongzhang Zhang , De-Chuan Zhan

We propose a Reinforcement Learning framework for sparse indirect control of large-scale multi-agent systems, where few controlled agents shape the collective behavior of many uncontrolled agents. The approach addresses this multi-scale…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-27 Luigi Catello , Italo Napolitano , Davide Salzano , Mario di Bernardo

We propose a hybrid reinforcement learning (RL) and model predictive control (MPC) framework for mixed-integer optimal control, where discrete variables enter the cost and dynamics but not the constraints. Existing hierarchical approaches…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-02 Joschua Wüthrich , Romir Damle , Giona Fieni , Melanie N. Zeilinger , Christopher H. Onder , Andrea Carron

Deep reinforcement learning in partially observable environments is a difficult task in itself, and can be further complicated by a sparse reward signal. Most tasks involving navigation in three-dimensional environments provide the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Matvey Gerasyov , Ilya Makarov

This paper studies the constrained/safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem with sparse indicator signals for constraint violations. We propose a model-based approach to enable RL agents to effectively explore the environment with unknown…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Zuxin Liu , Hongyi Zhou , Baiming Chen , Sicheng Zhong , Martial Hebert , Ding Zhao

Human demonstration data is often ambiguous and incomplete, motivating imitation learning approaches that also exhibit reliable planning behavior. A common paradigm to perform planning-from-demonstration involves learning a reward function…

Many Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) agents fail to adapt properly to cooperating with agents trained with the same objectives but different seeds, algorithms, or other training differences. This is the problem of Zero-Shot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Keenan Powell , Peihong Yu , Pratap Tokekar