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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

Deep reinforcement learning agents have achieved state-of-the-art results by directly maximising cumulative reward. However, environments contain a much wider variety of possible training signals. In this paper, we introduce an agent that…

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has witnessed great progress with various improvements in the self-training framework with pseudo labeling. The main challenge is how to distinguish high-quality pseudo labels against the confirmation bias.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Siyuan Li , Weiyang Jin , Zedong Wang , Fang Wu , Zicheng Liu , Cheng Tan , Stan Z. Li

Many Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) agents fail to adapt properly to cooperating with agents trained with the same objectives but different seeds, algorithms, or other training differences. This is the problem of Zero-Shot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Keenan Powell , Peihong Yu , Pratap Tokekar

Artificial Intelligence has been used to help human complete difficult tasks in complicated environments by providing optimized strategies for decision-making or replacing the manual labour. In environments including multiple agents, such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-24 Chaoyi Gu , Varuna De Silva , Corentin Artaud , Rafael Pina

Recent progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) and computer vision enables artificial agents to solve complex tasks, including locomotion, manipulation and video games from high-dimensional pixel observations. However, domain specific…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Ruihan Zhao , Ufuk Topcu , Sandeep Chinchali , Mariano Phielipp

Reinforcement learning often suffer from the sparse reward issue in real-world robotics problems. Learning from demonstration (LfD) is an effective way to eliminate this problem, which leverages collected expert data to aid online learning.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Yanjiang Guo , Jingyue Gao , Zheng Wu , Chengming Shi , Jianyu Chen

Potential-based reward shaping (PBRS) is a particular category of machine learning methods which aims to improve the learning speed of a reinforcement learning agent by extracting and utilizing extra knowledge while performing a task. There…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Babak Badnava , Mona Esmaeili , Nasser Mozayani , Payman Zarkesh-Ha

Much of the current work on reinforcement learning studies episodic settings, where the agent is reset between trials to an initial state distribution, often with well-shaped reward functions. Non-episodic settings, where the agent must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 John D. Co-Reyes , Suvansh Sanjeev , Glen Berseth , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine

One major limitation to the applicability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to many practical domains is the large number of samples required to learn an optimal policy. To address this problem and improve learning efficiency, we consider a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-07 Roberto Cipollone , Giuseppe De Giacomo , Marco Favorito , Luca Iocchi , Fabio Patrizi

Intelligent agents must pursue their goals in complex environments with partial information and often limited computational capacity. Reinforcement learning methods have achieved great success by creating agents that optimize engineered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Alejandro Daniel Noel , Charel van Hoof , Beren Millidge

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Meng Cao , Lei Shu , Lei Yu , Yun Zhu , Nevan Wichers , Yinxiao Liu , Lei Meng

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

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

Model-based reinforcement learning is a promising learning strategy for practical robotic applications due to its improved data-efficiency versus model-free counterparts. However, current state-of-the-art model-based methods rely on shaped…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-10 Robert McCarthy , Qiang Wang , Stephen J. Redmond

Learning from feedback is an instrumental process for advancing the capabilities and safety of frontier models, yet its effectiveness is often constrained by cost and scalability. We present a pilot study that explores scaling reward models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Jingxuan Fan , Yueying Li , Zhenting Qi , Dinghuai Zhang , Kianté Brantley , Sham M. Kakade , Hanlin Zhang

Reinforcement learning agents learn by encouraging behaviours which maximize their total reward, usually provided by the environment. In many environments, however, the reward is provided after a series of actions rather than each single…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Mohammad Reza Bonyadi , Rui Wang , Maryam Ziaei

Social navigation has been gaining attentions with the growth in machine intelligence. Since reinforcement learning can select an action in the prediction phase at a low computational cost, it has been formulated in a social navigation…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-04-15 Takato Okudo , Seiji Yamada

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

Learning to control an environment without hand-crafted rewards or expert data remains challenging and is at the frontier of reinforcement learning research. We present an unsupervised learning algorithm to train agents to achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-29 David Warde-Farley , Tom Van de Wiele , Tejas Kulkarni , Catalin Ionescu , Steven Hansen , Volodymyr Mnih