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Reinforcement learning has become a powerful paradigm for post-training large language model agents, yet credit assignment in multi-turn environments remains a challenge. Agents often receive sparse, trajectory-level rewards only at the end…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Siyuan Zhu , Chao Yu , Rongxin Yang , Zongkai Liu , Jinjun Hu , Qiwen Chen , Yibo Zhang

Many practical applications of reinforcement learning require agents to learn from sparse and delayed rewards. It challenges the ability of agents to attribute their actions to future outcomes. In this paper, we consider the problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-18 Zhizhou Ren , Ruihan Guo , Yuan Zhou , Jian Peng

In traditional reinforcement learning, an agent maximizes the reward collected during its interaction with the environment by approximating the optimal policy through the estimation of value functions. Typically, given a state s and action…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-20 Shangda Li , Selina Bing , Steven Yang

Reinforcement learning in multiagent systems has been studied in the fields of economic game theory, artificial intelligence and statistical physics by developing an analytical understanding of the learning dynamics (often in relation to…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Wolfram Barfuss , Jonathan F. Donges , Jürgen Kurths

Actor critic methods with sparse rewards in model-based deep reinforcement learning typically require a deterministic binary reward function that reflects only two possible outcomes: if, for each step, the goal has been achieved or not. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Juan Vargas , Lazar Andjelic , Amir Barati Farimani

We introduce Recursive Agent Optimization (RAO), a reinforcement learning approach for training recursive agents: agents that can spawn and delegate sub-tasks to new instantiations of themselves recursively. Recursive agents implement an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Apurva Gandhi , Satyaki Chakraborty , Xiangjun Wang , Aviral Kumar , Graham Neubig

Exploration efficiency is a challenging problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), as the policy learned by confederate MARL depends on the collaborative approach among multiple agents. Another important problem is the less…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-30 Qisheng Wang , Qichao Wang

Reward specification is one of the most tricky problems in Reinforcement Learning, which usually requires tedious hand engineering in practice. One promising approach to tackle this challenge is to adopt existing expert video demonstrations…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Yuwei Fu , Haichao Zhang , Di Wu , Wei Xu , Benoit Boulet

Differential temporal difference (TD) methods are value-based reinforcement learning algorithms that have been proposed for infinite-horizon problems. They rely on reward centering, where each reward is centered by the average reward. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Kris De Asis , Mohamed Elsayed , Jiamin He

We present a computational framework for synthesis of distributed control strategies for a heterogeneous team of robots in a partially observable environment. The goal is to cooperatively satisfy specifications given as Truncated Linear…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-07 Ningyuan Zhang , Wenliang Liu , Calin Belta

This paper presents an approach for accelerated learning of optimal plans for a given task represented using Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) in multi-agent systems. Given a set of options (temporally abstract actions) available to each agent,…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Nishant Doshi

In human society, the conflict between self-interest and collective well-being often obstructs efforts to achieve shared welfare. Related concepts like the Tragedy of the Commons and Social Dilemmas frequently manifest in our daily lives.…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Yue Jin , Shuangqing Wei , Giovanni Montana

In cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), how to design a suitable reward signal to accelerate learning and stabilize convergence is a critical problem. The global reward signal assigns the same global reward to all agents…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-03-10 Hangyu Mao , Zhibo Gong , Zhen Xiao

Future reward estimation is a core component of reinforcement learning agents; i.e., Q-value and state-value functions, predicting an agent's sum of future rewards. Their scalar output, however, obfuscates when or what individual future…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Mark Towers , Yali Du , Christopher Freeman , Timothy J. Norman

Reinforcement learning involves agents interacting with an environment to complete tasks. When rewards provided by the environment are sparse, agents may not receive immediate feedback on the quality of actions that they take, thereby…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Baicen Xiao , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Radha Poovendran

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

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is a challenging subarea of Reinforcement Learning due to the non-stationarity of the environments and the large dimensionality of the combined action space. Deep MARL algorithms have been applied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Yuanchao Xu , Amal Feriani , Ekram Hossain

This work focuses on the credit assignment problem in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Sharing the global advantage among agents often leads to insufficient policy optimization, as it fails to capture the coalitional…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Mengda Ji , Genjiu Xu , Keke Jia , Zekun Duan , Yong Qiu , Jianjun Ge , Mingqiang Li

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is challenging because an agent can rarely obtain non-zero rewards and hence, gradient-based optimization of parameterized policies can be incremental and slow. Recent work demonstrated that using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yijie Guo , Jongwook Choi , Marcin Moczulski , Shengyu Feng , Samy Bengio , Mohammad Norouzi , Honglak Lee

One of the preeminent obstacles to scaling multi-agent reinforcement learning to large numbers of agents is assigning credit to individual agents' actions. In this paper, we address this credit assignment problem with an approach that we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-24 Benjamin Freed , Aditya Kapoor , Ian Abraham , Jeff Schneider , Howie Choset