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Multi-task representation learning (MTRL) is an approach that learns shared latent representations across related tasks, facilitating collaborative learning that improves the overall learning efficiency. This paper studies MTRL for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yaoze Guo , Shana Moothedath

The use of Potential-Based Reward Shaping (PBRS) has shown great promise in the ongoing research effort to tackle sample inefficiency in Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, choosing the right potential function remains an open challenge.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Giuseppe Canonaco , Leo Ardon , Alberto Pozanco , Daniel Borrajo

Fine-grained visual reasoning remains a core challenge for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). The recently introduced ReasonMap highlights this gap by showing that even advanced MLLMs struggle with spatial reasoning in structured and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Sicheng Feng , Kaiwen Tuo , Song Wang , Lingdong Kong , Jianke Zhu , Huan Wang

There is a surge of interest in using formal languages such as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) to precisely and succinctly specify complex tasks and derive reward functions for Reinforcement Learning (RL). However, existing methods often assign…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Minjae Kwon , Ingy ElSayed-Aly , Lu Feng

To date, distributional reinforcement learning (distributional RL) methods have exclusively focused on the discounted setting, where an agent aims to optimize a discounted sum of rewards over time. In this work, we extend distributional RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Juan Sebastian Rojas , Chi-Guhn Lee

Successfully navigating a complex environment to obtain a desired outcome is a difficult task, that up to recently was believed to be capable only by humans. This perception has been broken down over time, especially with the introduction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Joshua Hare

Humans are spectacular reinforcement learners, constantly learning from and adjusting to experience and feedback. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily mean humans are fast learners. When tasks are challenging, learning can become…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Mark A. Rucker , Layne T. Watson , Matthew S. Gerber , Laura E. Barnes

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms struggle with learning optimal policies for tasks where reward feedback is sparse and depends on a complex sequence of events in the environment. Probabilistic reward machines (PRMs) are finite-state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jan Corazza , Hadi Partovi Aria , Daniel Neider , Zhe Xu

In goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL), sparse rewards present significant challenges, often obstructing efficient learning. Although multi-step GCRL can boost this efficiency, it can also lead to off-policy biases in target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-30 Lisheng Wu , Ke Chen

As a generalization of reinforcement learning (RL) to parametrizable goals, goal conditioned RL (GCRL) has a broad range of applications, particularly in challenging tasks in robotics. Recent work has established that the optimal value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Khadichabonu Valieva , Bikramjit Banerjee

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown its strength in challenging sequential decision-making problems. The reward function in RL is crucial to the learning performance, as it serves as a measure of the task completion degree. In real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Siyuan Li , Shijie Han , Yingnan Zhao , By Liang , Peng Liu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in various domains, yet it often relies on carefully designed programmatic reward functions to guide agent behavior. Designing such reward functions can be challenging and may not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Qi Wang , Mian Wu , Yuyang Zhang , Mingqi Yuan , Wenyao Zhang , Haoxiang You , Yunbo Wang , Xin Jin , Xiaokang Yang , Wenjun Zeng

One of the central challenges faced by a reinforcement learning (RL) agent is to effectively learn a (near-)optimal policy in environments with large state spaces having sparse and noisy feedback signals. In real-world applications, an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Rati Devidze , Volkan Cevher , Adish Singla

We investigate the effect of reward shaping in improving the performance of reinforcement learning in the context of the real-time strategy, capture-the-flag game. The game is characterized by sparse rewards that are associated with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-29 John Kliem , Prithviraj Dasgupta

Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) often struggles with long-horizon tasks, where errors in value estimation accumulate and produce unreliable policies. It is typically assumed that effective long-term planning is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Evgenii Opryshko , Junwei Quan , Claas Voelcker , Yilun Du , Igor Gilitschenski

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

With the increasing presence of robots in our every-day environments, improving their social skills is of utmost importance. Nonetheless, social robotics still faces many challenges. One bottleneck is that robotic behaviors need to be often…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-08 Anand Ballou , Xavier Alameda-Pineda , Chris Reinke

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising direction for training agents that are capable of solving multiple tasks and reach a diverse set of objectives. How to \textit{specify} and \textit{ground} these goals in such a…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a technique to learn the control policy for an agent that interacts with a stochastic environment. In any given state, the agent takes some action, and the environment determines the probability distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Gaurav Gupta , Chenzhong Yin , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh , Paul Bogdan

Providing a suitable reward function to reinforcement learning can be difficult in many real world applications. While inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) holds promise for automatically learning reward functions from demonstrations,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Lantao Yu , Tianhe Yu , Chelsea Finn , Stefano Ermon