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In multi-goal reinforcement learning (RL) settings, the reward for each goal is sparse, and located in a small neighborhood of the goal. In large dimension, the probability of reaching a reward vanishes and the agent receives little…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-17 Léonard Blier , Yann Ollivier

Sample efficiency is a crucial problem in deep reinforcement learning. Recent algorithms, such as REDQ and DroQ, found a way to improve the sample efficiency by increasing the update-to-data (UTD) ratio to 20 gradient update steps on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Aditya Bhatt , Daniel Palenicek , Boris Belousov , Max Argus , Artemij Amiranashvili , Thomas Brox , Jan Peters

Offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) improves sample efficiency by leveraging pre-collected datasets prior to online interaction. A key challenge, however, is learning an accurate critic in large state--action spaces with limited…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Andrew Choi , Wei Xu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy for finetuning small language models (SLMs) to solve targeted tasks such as math and coding. However, RL algorithms tend to be resource-intensive, taking a significant amount…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Lianghuan Huang , Sagnik Anupam , Insup Lee , Shuo Li , Osbert Bastani

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) with sparse rewards remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning. While hindsight experience replay (HER) has shown promise by relabeling collected trajectories with achieved…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Xing Lei , Wenyan Yang , Kaiqiang Ke , Shentao Yang , Xuetao Zhang , Joni Pajarinen , Donglin Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) aims to learn a policy solving a set of training tasks simultaneously and quickly adapting to new tasks. It requires massive amounts of data drawn from training tasks to infer the common structure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-21 Yijie Guo , Qiucheng Wu , Honglak Lee

This paper provides a statistical analysis of high-dimensional batch Reinforcement Learning (RL) using sparse linear function approximation. When there is a large number of candidate features, our result sheds light on the fact that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-10 Botao Hao , Yaqi Duan , Tor Lattimore , Csaba Szepesvári , Mengdi Wang

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods rely on experience replay to approximate the minibatched supervised learning setting; however, unlike supervised learning where access to lots of training data is crucial to generalization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Brett Daley , Cameron Hickert , Christopher Amato

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…

Aligning robot behavior with human preferences is crucial for deploying embodied AI agents in human-centered environments. A promising solution is interactive imitation learning from human intervention, where a human expert observes the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Yuxin Chen , Chen Tang , Jianglan Wei , Chenran Li , Ran Tian , Xiang Zhang , Wei Zhan , Peter Stone , Masayoshi Tomizuka

Learning continuous control in high-dimensional sparse reward settings, such as robotic manipulation, is a challenging problem due to the number of samples often required to obtain accurate optimal value and policy estimates. While many…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-29 Sreehari Rammohan , Shangqun Yu , Bowen He , Eric Hsiung , Eric Rosen , Stefanie Tellex , George Konidaris

Sparse rewards pose a significant challenge to achieving high sample efficiency in goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, in sequential manipulation tasks, the agent receives failure rewards until it successfully…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Yuming Huang , Bin Ren , Ziming Xu , Lianghong Wu

We propose a hybrid approach aimed at improving the sample efficiency in goal-directed reinforcement learning. We do this via a two-step mechanism where firstly, we approximate a model from Model-Free reinforcement learning. Then, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-09 Shoubhik Debnath , Gaurav Sukhatme , Lantao Liu

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) acquires meta-policies that show good performance for tasks in a wide task distribution. However, conventional meta-RL, which learns meta-policies by randomly sampling tasks, has been reported to show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-01 Morio Matsumoto , Hiroya Matsuba , Toshihiro Kujirai

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are designed to optimize problem-solving by learning actions that maximize rewards, a task that becomes particularly challenging in random and nonstationary environments. Even advanced RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Sebastian Zieglmeier , Niklas Erdmann , Narada D. Warakagoda

This paper presents a novel approach for unsupervised video summarization using reinforcement learning (RL), addressing limitations like unstable adversarial training and reliance on heuristic-based reward functions. The method operates on…

Multimedia · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Mehryar Abbasi , Hadi Hadizadeh , Parvaneh Saeedi

We propose a new reinforcement learning (RL) formulation for training continuous-time score-based diffusion models for generative AI to generate samples that maximize reward functions while keeping the generated distributions close to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Xuefeng Gao , Jiale Zha , Xun Yu Zhou

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

Designing rewards for Reinforcement Learning (RL) is challenging because it needs to convey the desired task, be efficient to optimize, and be easy to compute. The latter is particularly problematic when applying RL to robotics, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-28 Yiming Ding , Carlos Florensa , Mariano Phielipp , Pieter Abbeel