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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

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Philippe Morere , Gilad Francis , Tom Blau , Fabio Ramos

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) has proven to be a successful framework for leveraging experience from prior tasks to rapidly learn new related tasks, however, current meta-RL approaches struggle to learn in sparse reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-12-03 Charles Packer , Pieter Abbeel , Joseph E. Gonzalez

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central problem in artificial intelligence. This problem consists of defining artificial agents that can learn optimal behaviour by interacting with an environment -- where the optimal behaviour is defined…

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their selection of actions to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Temporal Difference (TD) Learning -- a model-free RL method -- is a leading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

This paper considers a class of reinforcement learning problems, which involve systems with two types of states: stochastic and pseudo-stochastic. In such systems, stochastic states follow a stochastic transition kernel while the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Honghao Wei , Xin Liu , Weina Wang , Lei Ying

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a sub-domain of machine learning, mainly concerned with solving sequential decision-making problems by a learning agent that interacts with the decision environment to improve its behavior through the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Hossein Hassani , Ehsan Hallaji , Roozbeh Razavi-Far , Mehrdad Saif , Liang Lin

The aim of multi-task reinforcement learning is two-fold: (1) efficiently learn by training against multiple tasks and (2) quickly adapt, using limited samples, to a variety of new tasks. In this work, the tasks correspond to reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Nicholas C. Landolfi , Garrett Thomas , Tengyu Ma

We introduce Self-supervised Online Reward Shaping (SORS), which aims to improve the sample efficiency of any RL algorithm in sparse-reward environments by automatically densifying rewards. The proposed framework alternates between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Farzan Memarian , Wonjoon Goo , Rudolf Lioutikov , Scott Niekum , Ufuk Topcu

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

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have exhibited great potential in solving single-task sequential decision-making problems with high-dimensional observations and long horizons, but are known to be hard to generalize across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Boyuan Chen , Chuning Zhu , Pulkit Agrawal , Kaiqing Zhang , Abhishek Gupta

Many continuous control problems can be formulated as sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. In principle, online RL methods can automatically explore the state space to solve each new task. However, discovering sequences of…

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated its superiority on many complex sequential decision-making problems. However, heavy dependence on dense rewards and high sample-complexity impedes the wide adoption of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Zhuangdi Zhu , Kaixiang Lin , Bo Dai , Jiayu Zhou

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for robotic path planning in uncertain environments. However, the control policies trained for an RL agent crucially depend on user-defined, state-based reward functions. Poorly designed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Anand Balakrishnan , Stefan Jakšić , Edgar A. Aguilar , Dejan Ničković , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh

Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) methods can successfully solve a wide range of sequential decision problems. However, learning policies that can generalize predictably across multiple tasks in a setting with non-Markovian reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Guillermo Infante , David Kuric , Anders Jonsson , Vicenç Gómez , Herke van Hoof

In this paper we consider self-supervised representation learning to improve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL). We propose a forward prediction objective for simultaneously learning embeddings of states and action sequences.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-15 William Whitney , Rajat Agarwal , Kyunghyun Cho , Abhinav Gupta

Online reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are often difficult to deploy in complex human-facing applications as they may learn slowly and have poor early performance. To address this, we introduce a practical algorithm for incorporating…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Tong Mu , Georgios Theocharous , David Arbour , Emma Brunskill

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms require large amounts of experience to learn an individual task. While in principle meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) algorithms enable agents to learn new skills from small amounts of experience,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-21 Kate Rakelly , Aurick Zhou , Deirdre Quillen , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Reward functions are central in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding agents towards optimal decision-making. The complexity of RL tasks requires meticulously designed reward functions that effectively drive learning while avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Rati Devidze

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework to optimize a control policy using rewards that are revealed by the system as a response to a control action. In its standard form, RL involves a single agent that uses its policy to accomplish a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-11-24 Juan Cervino , Juan Andres Bazerque , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro