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While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has fueled multiple high-profile successes in machine learning, it is held back from more widespread adoption by its often poor data efficiency and the limited generality of the policies it produces. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Jacob Beck , Risto Vuorio , Evan Zheran Liu , Zheng Xiong , Luisa Zintgraf , Chelsea Finn , Shimon Whiteson

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) is well-suitedd for solving complex tasks by breaking them down into structured policies. However, HRL agents often struggle with efficient exploration and quick adaptation. To overcome these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Arash Khajooeinejad , Fatemeh Sadat Masoumi , Masoumeh Chapariniya

In many sequential decision making tasks, it is challenging to design reward functions that help an RL agent efficiently learn behavior that is considered good by the agent designer. A number of different formulations of the reward-design…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-25 Zeyu Zheng , Junhyuk Oh , Satinder Singh

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently proven great success in various domains. Yet, the design of the reward function requires detailed domain expertise and tedious fine-tuning to ensure that agents are able to learn the desired…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Murad Dawood , Nils Dengler , Jorge de Heuvel , Maren Bennewitz

Exploration in complex domains is a key challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks with very sparse rewards. Recent successes in deep reinforcement learning have been achieved mostly using simple heuristic exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-07 Joshua Achiam , Shankar Sastry

In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Grigorii Veviurko , Wendelin Böhmer , Mathijs de Weerdt

Reward design is a critical part of the application of reinforcement learning, the performance of which strongly depends on how well the reward signal frames the goal of the designer and how well the signal assesses progress in reaching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Yixiang Wang , Yujing Hu , Feng Wu , Yingfeng Chen

Reinforcement learning for embodied agents is a challenging problem. The accumulated reward to be optimized is often a very rugged function, and gradient methods are impaired by many local optimizers. We demonstrate, in an experimental…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-06-01 Guido Montufar , Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi , Nihat Ay

While reinforcement learning (RL) has been successful in natural language processing (NLP) domains such as dialogue generation and text-based games, it typically faces the problem of sparse rewards that leads to slow or no convergence.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Ameet Deshpande , Eve Fleisig

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

Constraint handling plays a key role in solving realistic complex optimization problems. Though intensively discussed in the last few decades, existing constraint handling techniques predominantly rely on human experts' designs, which more…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Qianhao Zhu , Sijie Ma , Zeyuan Ma , Hongshu Guo , Yue-Jiao Gong

Reinforcement learning is a promising framework for solving control problems, but its use in practical situations is hampered by the fact that reward functions are often difficult to engineer. Specifying goals and tasks for autonomous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-22 Justin Fu , Anoop Korattikara , Sergey Levine , Sergio Guadarrama

The reinforcement learning (RL) research area is very active, with an important number of new contributions; especially considering the emergent field of deep RL (DRL). However a number of scientific and technical challenges still need to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-20 Arthur Aubret , Laetitia Matignon , Salima Hassas

Meta-reinforcement learning (RL) methods can meta-train policies that adapt to new tasks with orders of magnitude less data than standard RL, but meta-training itself is costly and time-consuming. If we can meta-train on offline data, then…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-08 Vitchyr H. Pong , Ashvin Nair , Laura Smith , Catherine Huang , Sergey Levine

Autonomous navigation in crowded environments is an open problem with many applications, essential for the coexistence of robots and humans in the smart cities of the future. In recent years, deep reinforcement learning approaches have…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Diego Martinez-Baselga , Luis Riazuelo , Luis Montano

Learning effective policies for sparse objectives is a key challenge in Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). A common approach is to design task-related dense rewards to improve task learnability. While such rewards are easily interpreted,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-12 Hassam Sheikh , Shauharda Khadka , Santiago Miret , Somdeb Majumdar

Meta-learning algorithms use past experience to learn to quickly solve new tasks. In the context of reinforcement learning, meta-learning algorithms acquire reinforcement learning procedures to solve new problems more efficiently by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-01 Abhishek Gupta , Benjamin Eysenbach , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

A significant challenge for the practical application of reinforcement learning in the real world is the need to specify an oracle reward function that correctly defines a task. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to avoid this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-16 Kelvin Xu , Ellis Ratner , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has improved the reasoning ability of large language models, yet training remains costly because many rollouts contribute little to optimization, considering the amount of computation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Yan Sun , Jia Guo , Stanley Kok , Zihao Wang , Zujie Wen , Zhiqiang Zhang

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