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It is a long-standing challenge to enable an intelligent agent to learn in one environment and generalize to an unseen environment without further data collection and finetuning. In this paper, we consider a zero shot generalization problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Huazhe Xu , Boyuan Chen , Yang Gao , Trevor Darrell

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

Large-scale autoregressive models pretrained on next-token prediction and finetuned with reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved unprecedented success on many problem domains. During RL, these models explore by generating new outputs, one…

Reinforcement learning often needs to deal with the exponential growth of states and actions when exploring optimal control in high-dimensional spaces (often known as the curse of dimensionality). In this work, we address this issue by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-23 Yining Li , Peizhong Ju , Ness Shroff

Manipulation tasks such as preparing a meal or assembling furniture remain highly challenging for robotics and vision. Traditional task and motion planning (TAMP) methods can solve complex tasks but require full state observability and are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Robin Strudel , Alexander Pashevich , Igor Kalevatykh , Ivan Laptev , Josef Sivic , Cordelia Schmid

Decoding-based regression, which reformulates regression as a sequence generation task, has emerged as a promising paradigm of applying large language models for numerical prediction. However, its progress is hindered by the misalignment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Ming Chen , Sheng Tang , Rong-Xi Tan , Ziniu Li , Jiacheng Chen , Ke Xue , Chao Qian

Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is the predominant algorithm for training text generation models. This paradigm relies on direct supervision examples, which is not applicable to many emerging applications, such as generating adversarial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Han Guo , Bowen Tan , Zhengzhong Liu , Eric P. Xing , Zhiting Hu

Practising and honing skills forms a fundamental component of how humans learn, yet artificial agents are rarely specifically trained to perform them. Instead, they are usually trained end-to-end, with the hope being that useful skills will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-17 Michael Matthews , Mikayel Samvelyan , Jack Parker-Holder , Edward Grefenstette , Tim Rocktäschel

This article surveys reinforcement learning approaches in social robotics. Reinforcement learning is a framework for decision-making problems in which an agent interacts through trial-and-error with its environment to discover an optimal…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Neziha Akalin , Amy Loutfi

Large language models are increasingly used for complex reasoning tasks where high-quality offline data such as expert-annotated solutions and distilled reasoning traces are often available. However, in environments with sparse rewards,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Yihao Liu , Shuocheng Li , Lang Cao , Yuhang Xie , Mengyu Zhou , Haoyu Dong , Xiaojun Ma , Shi Han , Dongmei Zhang

Model free reinforcement learning suffers from the high sampling complexity inherent to robotic manipulation or locomotion tasks. Most successful approaches typically use random sampling strategies which leads to slow policy convergence. In…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-08-13 Miroslav Bogdanovic , Ludovic Righetti

We consider the problem of learning from sparse and underspecified rewards, where an agent receives a complex input, such as a natural language instruction, and needs to generate a complex response, such as an action sequence, while only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Rishabh Agarwal , Chen Liang , Dale Schuurmans , Mohammad Norouzi

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

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) can acquire complex behaviors from low-level inputs, such as images. However, real-world applications of such methods require generalizing to the vast variability of the real world. Deep networks are known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-13 Chelsea Finn , Tianhe Yu , Justin Fu , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

In complex tasks, such as those with large combinatorial action spaces, random exploration may be too inefficient to achieve meaningful learning progress. In this work, we use a curriculum of progressively growing action spaces to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-01 Gregory Farquhar , Laura Gustafson , Zeming Lin , Shimon Whiteson , Nicolas Usunier , Gabriel Synnaeve

We present a framework for learning hierarchical policies from demonstrations, using sparse natural language annotations to guide the discovery of reusable skills for autonomous decision-making. We formulate a generative model of action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Pratyusha Sharma , Antonio Torralba , Jacob Andreas

Social navigation has been gaining attentions with the growth in machine intelligence. Since reinforcement learning can select an action in the prediction phase at a low computational cost, it has been formulated in a social navigation…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-04-15 Takato Okudo , Seiji Yamada

Existing reinforcement learning strategies based on outcome supervision have proven effective in enhancing the performance of large language models(LLMs) for code generation. While reinforcement learning based on process supervision has…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Yufan Ye , Ting Zhang , Wenbin Jiang , Hua Huang

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy learning from pre-collected datasets, avoiding costly and risky online interactions, but it often struggles with long-horizon tasks involving sparse rewards. Existing goal-conditioned and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Chengyang Gu , Yuxin Pan , Hui Xiong , Yize Chen

Skills learned through (deep) reinforcement learning often generalizes poorly across domains and re-training is necessary when presented with a new task. We present a framework that combines techniques in \textit{formal methods} with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-05-22 Xiao Li , Yao Ma , Calin Belta