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Applying reinforcement learning (RL) to sparse reward domains is notoriously challenging due to insufficient guiding signals. Common RL techniques for addressing such domains include (1) learning from demonstrations and (2) curriculum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-29 Vaibhav Bajaj , Guni Sharon , Peter Stone

Multi-goal reinforcement learning (RL) aims to qualify the agent to accomplish multi-goal tasks, which is of great importance in learning scalable robotic manipulation skills. However, reward engineering always requires strenuous efforts in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Deyu Yang , Hanbo Zhang , Xuguang Lan , Jishiyu Ding

Intelligent agents must pursue their goals in complex environments with partial information and often limited computational capacity. Reinforcement learning methods have achieved great success by creating agents that optimize engineered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Alejandro Daniel Noel , Charel van Hoof , Beren Millidge

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents are trained through trial-and-error interactions with the environment. This leads to a long training time for dense neural networks to achieve good performance. Hence, prohibitive computation and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-09 Ghada Sokar , Elena Mocanu , Decebal Constantin Mocanu , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Peter Stone

Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is an approach wherein the experience gained from solving a variety of tasks is distilled into a meta-policy. The meta-policy, when adapted over only a small (or just a single) number of steps, is able…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-28 Desik Rengarajan , Sapana Chaudhary , Jaewon Kim , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to be often unsuccessful in environments with sparse extrinsic rewards. A possible countermeasure is to endow RL agents with an intrinsic reward function, or 'intrinsic motivation', which rewards the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Francesco Massari , Martin Biehl , Lisa Meeden , Ryota Kanai

Sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) can model a wide range of highly complex tasks. Solving sparse-reward tasks is RL's core premise, requiring efficient exploration coupled with long-horizon credit assignment, and overcoming these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Leander Diaz-Bone , Marco Bagatella , Jonas Hübotter , Andreas Krause

Agents that can learn to imitate given video observation -- \emph{without direct access to state or action information} are more applicable to learning in the natural world. However, formulating a reinforcement learning (RL) agent that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-14 Glen Berseth , Florian Golemo , Christopher Pal

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents have demonstrated their potential across various robotic tasks. However, they still heavily rely on human-engineered reward functions, requiring extensive trial-and-error and access to target behavior…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Changyeon Kim , Minho Heo , Doohyun Lee , Jinwoo Shin , Honglak Lee , Joseph J. Lim , Kimin Lee

Dealing with environments with sparse rewards has always been crucial for systems developed to operate in autonomous open-ended learning settings. Intrinsic Motivations could be an effective way to help Deep Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Gianluca Maselli , Vieri Giuliano Santucci

Data-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous state-action spaces using very high-dimensional observations remains a key challenge in developing fully autonomous systems. We consider a particularly important instance of this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-10-12 John-Alexander M. Assael , Niklas Wahlström , Thomas B. Schön , Marc Peter Deisenroth

Learning long-horizon manipulation tasks efficiently is a central challenge in robot learning from demonstration. Unlike recent endeavors that focus on directly learning the task in the action domain, we focus on inferring what the robot…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Adrian Röfer , Nick Heppert , Abhinav Valada

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

Designing reward functions that generalize beyond controlled laboratory settings remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning for robotics. In open-world manipulation problems, a single task can appear in numerous variants…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Tengye Xu , Yangting Sun , Ziju Shen , Guanqi Chen , Zhen Fu , Chen yizhou , Hua Chen , Jia Pan

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

Demonstrations are widely used in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for facilitating solving tasks with sparse rewards. However, the tasks in real-world scenarios can often have varied initial conditions from the demonstration, which would…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Ruiqi Zhu , Siyuan Li , Tianhong Dai , Chongjie Zhang , Oya Celiktutan

Reward function design and exploration time are arguably the biggest obstacles to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real world. In many real-world tasks, designing a reward function takes considerable hand…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-06-14 Pierre Sermanet , Kelvin Xu , Sergey Levine

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

While reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to enable robots to autonomously acquire a wide range of skills, in practice, RL usually requires manual, per-task engineering of reward functions, especially in real world settings where…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-02-15 Tianhe Yu , Gleb Shevchuk , Dorsa Sadigh , Chelsea Finn

Imitation learning is an effective alternative approach to learn a policy when the reward function is sparse. In this paper, we consider a challenging setting where an agent and an expert use different actions from each other. We assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Konrad Zolna , Negar Rostamzadeh , Yoshua Bengio , Sungjin Ahn , Pedro O. Pinheiro