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Sparse neural systems are gaining traction for efficient continual learning due to their modularity and low interference. Architectures such as Sparse Distributed Memory Multi-Layer Perceptrons (SDMLP) construct task-specific subnetworks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Huiyan Xue , Xuming Ran , Yaxin Li , Qi Xu , Enhui Li , Yi Xu , Qiang Zhang

Exploration in sparse reward reinforcement learning remains an open challenge. Many state-of-the-art methods use intrinsic motivation to complement the sparse extrinsic reward signal, giving the agent more opportunities to receive feedback…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-24 Jingwei Zhang , Niklas Wetzel , Nicolai Dorka , Joschka Boedecker , Wolfram Burgard

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning, particularly in environments where external rewards are sparse. Here we focus on exploration with intrinsic rewards, where the agent transiently augments the external rewards with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Changmin Yu , Neil Burgess , Maneesh Sahani , Samuel J. Gershman

Diffusion distillation, exemplified by Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), has shown great promise in few-step generation but often sacrifices quality for sampling speed. While integrating Reinforcement Learning (RL) into distillation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Linwei Dong , Ruoyu Guo , Ge Bai , Zehuan Yuan , Yawei Luo , Changqing Zou

Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) facilitates efficient inference by distilling multi-step diffusion models into few-step variants. Concurrently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a vital tool for aligning generative models…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Dengyang Jiang , Dongyang Liu , Zanyi Wang , Qilong Wu , Liuzhuozheng Li , Hengzhuang Li , Xin Jin , David Liu , Changsheng Lu , Zhen Li , Bo Zhang , Mengmeng Wang , Steven Hoi , Peng Gao , Harry Yang

In self-supervised learning, self-distilled methods have shown impressive performance, learning representations useful for downstream tasks and even displaying emergent properties. However, state-of-the-art methods usually rely on ensembles…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Esteban Rodríguez-Betancourt , Edgar Casasola-Murillo

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

In the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, the learning is guided through a reward signal. This means that in situations of sparse rewards the agent has to focus on exploration, in order to discover which action, or set of actions leads…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-03 Giuseppe Paolo

This paper reviews exploration techniques in deep reinforcement learning. Exploration techniques are of primary importance when solving sparse reward problems. In sparse reward problems, the reward is rare, which means that the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Pawel Ladosz , Lilian Weng , Minwoo Kim , Hyondong Oh

Large language models are increasingly post-trained with reinforcement learning in verifiable domains such as code and math. Yet, current methods for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) learn only from a scalar outcome…

In continuous control, exploration is often performed through undirected strategies in which parameters of the networks or selected actions are perturbed by random noise. Although the deep setting of undirected exploration has been shown to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Baturay Saglam , Suleyman S. Kozat

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) exhibit exceptional energy efficiency on neuromorphic hardware due to their sparse activation patterns. However, conventional training methods based on surrogate gradients and Backpropagation Through Time…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Xiaochen Zhao , Chengting Yu , Kairong Yu , Lei Liu , Aili Wang

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to find a specified spot in an unseen environment by following natural language instructions. Dominant methods based on supervised learning clone expert's behaviours and thus perform…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-07-22 Hu Wang , Qi Wu , Chunhua Shen

As a fundamental problem, numerous methods are dedicated to the optimization of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), in a multi-user setting. Although traditional model-based optimization methods achieve strong performance, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-16 Longfei Ma , Nan Cheng , Xiucheng Wang , Zhisheng Yin , Haibo Zhou , Wei Quan

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods that incorporate deep neural networks (DNN), though powerful, often lack transparency. Their black-box characteristic hinders interpretability and reduces trustworthiness, particularly in critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Konrad Nowosadko , Franco Ruggeri , Ahmad Terra

Uncertainty quantification is central to safe and efficient deployments of deep learning models, yet many computationally practical methods lack lacking rigorous theoretical motivation. Random network distillation (RND) is a lightweight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Moritz A. Zanger , Yijun Wu , Pascal R. Van der Vaart , Wendelin Böhmer , Matthijs T. J. Spaan

Self-training systems often degenerate due to the lack of an external criterion for judging data quality, leading to reward hacking and semantic drift. This paper provides a proof-of-concept system architecture for stable self-training…

We explore a novel perspective of knowledge distillation (KD) for learning to rank (LTR), and introduce Self-Distilled neural Rankers (SDR), where student rankers are parameterized identically to their teachers. Unlike the existing ranking…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-04-07 Zhen Qin , Le Yan , Yi Tay , Honglei Zhuang , Xuanhui Wang , Michael Bendersky , Marc Najork

We consider the problem of imitation learning from a finite set of expert trajectories, without access to reinforcement signals. The classical approach of extracting the expert's reward function via inverse reinforcement learning, followed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Ruohan Wang , Carlo Ciliberto , Pierluigi Amadori , Yiannis Demiris

Current post-training methods in verifiable settings fall into two categories. Reinforcement learning (RLVR) relies on binary rewards, which are broadly applicable and powerful, but provide only sparse supervision during training.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Yinghui He , Simran Kaur , Adithya Bhaskar , Yongjin Yang , Jiarui Liu , Narutatsu Ri , Liam Fowl , Abhishek Panigrahi , Danqi Chen , Sanjeev Arora