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Related papers: ELEMENT: Episodic and Lifelong Exploration via Max…

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Existing episodic reinforcement algorithms assume that the length of an episode is fixed across time and known a priori. In this paper, we consider a general framework of episodic reinforcement learning when the length of each episode is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-08 Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic , Jiarui Gan , Adish Singla , Rupak Majumdar

Actor-critic deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have recently achieved prominent success in tackling various challenging reinforcement learning (RL) problems, particularly complex control tasks with high-dimensional continuous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-04 Gang Chen , Victoria Huang

Efficient exploration in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a challenging problem when receiving only a team reward, especially in environments with sparse rewards. A powerful method to mitigate this issue involves crafting dense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Xuefei Wu , Xiao Yin , Yuanyang Zhu , Chunlin Chen

To achieve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL), it necessitates efficiently exploring the underlying environment. Under the offline setting, addressing the exploration challenge lies in collecting an offline dataset with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Shuang Qiu , Jieping Ye , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

The remarkable empirical performance of distributional reinforcement learning (RL) has garnered increasing attention to understanding its theoretical advantages over classical RL. By decomposing the categorical distributional loss commonly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Ke Sun , Yingnan Zhao , Enze Shi , Yafei Wang , Xiaodong Yan , Bei Jiang , Linglong Kong

Training LLM agents in multi-turn environments with sparse rewards, where completing a single task requires 30+ turns of interaction within an episode, presents a fundamental challenge for reinforcement learning. We identify a critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Wujiang Xu , Wentian Zhao , Zhenting Wang , Yu-Jhe Li , Can Jin , Mingyu Jin , Kai Mei , Kun Wan , Dimitris N. Metaxas

Large Language Models (LLMs) consistently benefit from scaled Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, but also suffer from heavy computational overhead. To address this issue, efficient reasoning aims to incentivize short yet accurate thinking…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Taiqiang Wu , Zenan Xu , Bo Zhou , Ngai Wong

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Viraj Mehta , Ian Char , Joseph Abbate , Rory Conlin , Mark D. Boyer , Stefano Ermon , Jeff Schneider , Willie Neiswanger

In this paper we consider the problem of how a reinforcement learning agent that is tasked with solving a sequence of reinforcement learning problems (a sequence of Markov decision processes) can use knowledge acquired early in its lifetime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-05 Francisco M. Garcia , Philip S. Thomas

The principle of maximum entropy is a broadly applicable technique for computing a distribution with the least amount of information possible while constrained to match empirically estimated feature expectations. However, in many real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-16 Kenneth Bogert , Yikang Gui , Prashant Doshi

Batch reinforcement learning (RL) aims at leveraging pre-collected data to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected total rewards in a dynamic environment. The existing methods require absolutely continuous assumption (e.g., there…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-27 Xiaohong Chen , Zhengling Qi , Runzhe Wan

Lifelong event detection aims to incrementally update a model with new event types and data while retaining the capability on previously learned old types. One critical challenge is that the model would catastrophically forget old types…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Minqian Liu , Shiyu Chang , Lifu Huang

Navigating and understanding complex and unknown environments autonomously demands more than just basic perception and movement from embodied agents. Truly effective exploration requires agents to possess higher-level cognitive abilities,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Abdel Hakim Drid , Vincenzo Suriani , Daniele Nardi , Abderrezzak Debilou

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a key approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, prevalent RL approaches like proximal policy optimization and group relative policy optimization suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jingtong Gao , Ling Pan , Yejing Wang , Rui Zhong , Chi Lu , Maolin Wang , Qingpeng Cai , Peng Jiang , Xiangyu Zhao

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) with real-time planning has shown great potential in locomotion and manipulation control tasks. However, the existing planning methods, such as the Cross-Entropy Method (CEM), do not scale well to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-12 Mostafa Kotb , Cornelius Weber , Stefan Wermter

We present a maximum entropy inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) approach for improving the sample quality of diffusion generative models, especially when the number of generation time steps is small. Similar to how IRL trains a policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Sangwoong Yoon , Himchan Hwang , Dohyun Kwon , Yung-Kyun Noh , Frank C. Park

Entropy minimization (EM) trains the model to concentrate even more probability mass on its most confident outputs. We show that this simple objective alone, without any labeled data, can substantially improve large language models' (LLMs)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Shivam Agarwal , Zimin Zhang , Lifan Yuan , Jiawei Han , Hao Peng

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a learning paradigm where an agent learns from a fixed dataset of experience. However, learning solely from a static dataset can limit the performance due to the lack of exploration. To overcome it,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Kai Zhao , Jianye Hao , Yi Ma , Jinyi Liu , Yan Zheng , Zhaopeng Meng

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks where extrinsic rewards from environments are sparse or even totally disregarded. Significant advances based on intrinsic motivation show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Chenjia Bai , Peng Liu , Kaiyu Liu , Lingxiao Wang , Yingnan Zhao , Lei Han

Exploration is a prerequisite for learning useful behaviors in sparse-reward, long-horizon tasks, particularly within 3D environments. Curiosity-driven reinforcement learning addresses this via intrinsic rewards derived from the mismatch…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Lily Goli , Justin Kerr , Daniele Reda , Alec Jacobson , Andrea Tagliasacchi , Angjoo Kanazawa