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Training cooperative agents in sparse-reward scenarios poses significant challenges for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Without clear feedback on actions at each step in sparse-reward setting, previous methods struggle with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

Imitation learning is an effective alternative approach to learn a policy when the reward function is sparse. In this paper, we consider a challenging setting where an agent and an expert use different actions from each other. We assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Konrad Zolna , Negar Rostamzadeh , Yoshua Bengio , Sungjin Ahn , Pedro O. Pinheiro

Many cooperative multiagent reinforcement learning environments provide agents with a sparse team-based reward, as well as a dense agent-specific reward that incentivizes learning basic skills. Training policies solely on the team-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Shauharda Khadka , Somdeb Majumdar , Santiago Miret , Stephen McAleer , Kagan Tumer

Reward shaping is effective in addressing the sparse-reward challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) by providing immediate feedback through auxiliary, informative rewards. Based on the reward shaping strategy, we propose a novel multi-task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Haozhe Ma , Zhengding Luo , Thanh Vinh Vo , Kuankuan Sima , Tze-Yun Leong

In reinforcement learning, the discount factor $\gamma$ controls the agent's effective planning horizon. Traditionally, this parameter was considered part of the MDP; however, as deep reinforcement learning algorithms tend to become…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Chen Tessler , Shie Mannor

This paper introduces a novel transfer learning framework for deep multi-agent reinforcement learning. The approach automatically combines goal-conditioned policies with temporal contrastive learning to discover meaningful sub-goals. The…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Weihao Zeng , Joseph Campbell , Simon Stepputtis , Katia Sycara

To promote cooperation in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning, the reward signals of all agents can be aggregated together, forming global rewards that are commonly known as the fully cooperative setting. However, global rewards are usually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Bang Giang Le , Viet Cuong Ta

Large language model alignment via reinforcement learning depends critically on reward function quality. However, static, domain-specific reward models are often costly to train and exhibit poor generalization in out-of-distribution…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Andrew Zhuoer Feng , Cunxiang Wang , Bosi Wen , Yidong Wang , Yu Luo , Hongning Wang , Minlie Huang

Developing an agent capable of adapting to unseen environments remains a difficult challenge in imitation learning. This work presents Adaptive Return-conditioned Policy (ARP), an efficient framework designed to enhance the agent's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Changyeon Kim , Younggyo Seo , Hao Liu , Lisa Lee , Jinwoo Shin , Honglak Lee , Kimin Lee

This paper presents a novel approach to Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) that combines cooperative task decomposition with the learning of reward machines (RMs) encoding the structure of the sub-tasks. The proposed method helps…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Leo Ardon , Daniel Furelos-Blanco , Alessandra Russo

The main challenge of multiagent reinforcement learning is the difficulty of learning useful policies in the presence of other simultaneously learning agents whose changing behaviors jointly affect the environment's transition and reward…

In graph-structured multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) adversarial tasks such as pursuit and confrontation, agents must coordinate under highly dynamic interactions, where sparse rewards hinder efficient policy learning. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Ruochuan Shi , Runyu Lu , Yuanheng Zhu , Dongbin Zhao

When learning a task as a team, some agents in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) may fail to understand their true impact in the performance of the team. Such agents end up learning sub-optimal policies, demonstrating undesired lazy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Rafael Pina , Varuna De Silva , Corentin Artaud

A long-standing goal of reinforcement learning is to acquire agents that can learn on training tasks and generalize well on unseen tasks that may share a similar dynamic but with different reward functions. The ability to generalize across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Chengyang Ying , Xinning Zhou , Zhongkai Hao , Hang Su , Songming Liu , Dong Yan , Jun Zhu

Long-term temporal credit assignment is an important challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). It refers to the ability of the agent to attribute actions to consequences that may occur after a long time interval. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Tanmay Gangwani , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng

Since the earliest days of reinforcement learning, the workhorse method for assigning credit to actions over time has been temporal-difference (TD) learning, which propagates credit backward timestep-by-timestep. This approach suffers when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-25 David Raposo , Sam Ritter , Adam Santoro , Greg Wayne , Theophane Weber , Matt Botvinick , Hado van Hasselt , Francis Song

Many cooperative multi-agent problems require agents to learn individual tasks while contributing to the collective success of the group. This is a challenging task for current state-of-the-art multi-agent reinforcement algorithms that are…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-03-25 Hassam Ullah Sheikh , Ladislau Bölöni

TD($\lambda$) in value-based MARL algorithms or the Temporal Difference critic learning in Actor-Critic-based (AC-based) algorithms synergistically integrate elements from Monte-Carlo simulation and Q function bootstrapping via dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yue Deng , Zirui Wang , Yin Zhang

We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning where a group of agents, with jointly observed states and private local actions and rewards, collaborate to learn the value function of a given policy via local…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-08 Dongsheng Ding , Xiaohan Wei , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Mihailo R. Jovanović

In general-sum games, the interaction of self-interested learning agents commonly leads to socially worse outcomes, such as defect-defect in the iterated stag hunt (ISH). Previous works address this challenge by sharing rewards or shaping…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Ziyi Liu , Yongchun Fang