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Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-10 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

In this paper, we introduce a regularized mean-field game and study learning of this game under an infinite-horizon discounted reward function. Regularization is introduced by adding a strongly concave regularization function to the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-11 Berkay Anahtarci , Can Deha Kariksiz , Naci Saldi

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

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

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved many impressive results in recent years. However, tasks with sparse rewards or long horizons continue to pose significant challenges. To tackle these important problems, we propose a general…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-04-12 Carlos Florensa , Yan Duan , Pieter Abbeel

A significant challenge in developing AI that can generalize well is designing agents that learn about their world without being told what to learn, and apply that learning to challenges with sparse rewards. Moreover, most traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-21 Eric Zelikman , William Yin , Kenneth Wang

Intrinsic motivation enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to explore when rewards are very sparse, where traditional exploration heuristics such as Boltzmann or e-greedy would typically fail. However, intrinsic exploration is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Philippe Morere , Fabio Ramos

Dealing with sparse rewards is one of the biggest challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL). We present a novel technique called Hindsight Experience Replay which allows sample-efficient learning from rewards which are sparse and binary and…

In vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, it is prevalent to assign auxiliary tasks with a surrogate self-supervised loss so as to obtain more semantic representations and improve sample efficiency. However, abundant information in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-16 Yue Zhao , Chenzhuang Du , Hang Zhao , Tiejun Li

Simplicity is a powerful inductive bias. In reinforcement learning, regularization is used for simpler policies, data augmentation for simpler representations, and sparse reward functions for simpler objectives, all that, with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Bang You , Puze Liu , Huaping Liu , Jan Peters , Oleg Arenz

Replay is a powerful strategy to promote learning in artificial intelligence and the brain. However, the conditions to generate it and its functional advantages have not been fully recognized. In this study, we develop a modular…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-10-08 Jiyi Wang , Likai Tang , Huimiao Chen , Marcelo G Mattar , Sen Song

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

Designing effective reward functions remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, especially in multi-objective environments. In this work, we propose Multi-Objective Reward Shaping with Exploration (MORSE), a general framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Yuqing Xie , Jiayu Chen , Wenhao Tang , Ya Zhang , Chao Yu , Yu Wang

It is often difficult to hand-specify what the correct reward function is for a task, so researchers have instead aimed to learn reward functions from human behavior or feedback. The types of behavior interpreted as evidence of the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-14 Hong Jun Jeon , Smitha Milli , Anca D. Dragan

Innate values describe agents' intrinsic motivations, which reflect their inherent interests and preferences for pursuing goals and drive them to develop diverse skills that satisfy their various needs. Traditional reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Qin Yang

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) denotes a powerful family of algorithms for recovering a reward function justifying the behavior demonstrated by an expert agent. A well-known limitation of IRL is the ambiguity in the choice of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-26 Alberto Maria Metelli , Filippo Lazzati , Marcello Restelli

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

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven effective for complex reasoning tasks with clear correctness signals such as math and coding. However, extending it to real-world reasoning tasks is challenging, as evaluation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Anisha Gunjal , Anthony Wang , Elaine Lau , Vaskar Nath , Yunzhong He , Bing Liu , Sean Hendryx

In the search for more sample-efficient reinforcement-learning (RL) algorithms, a promising direction is to leverage as much external off-policy data as possible. For instance, expert demonstrations. In the past, multiple ideas have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Jesus Bujalance Martin , Fabien Moutarde

State-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically use random sampling (e.g., $\epsilon$-greedy) for exploration, but this method fails on hard exploration tasks like Montezuma's Revenge. To address the challenge of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Eric Chen , Zhang-Wei Hong , Joni Pajarinen , Pulkit Agrawal