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In complex real-world tasks such as robotic manipulation and autonomous driving, collecting expert demonstrations is often more straightforward than specifying precise learning objectives and task descriptions. Learning from expert data can…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Daulet Baimukashev , Gokhan Alcan , Kevin Sebastian Luck , Ville Kyrki

In recent years Landmark Complexes have been successfully employed for localization-free and metric-free autonomous exploration using a group of sensing-limited and communication-limited robots in a GPS-denied environment. To ensure rapid…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Xiatao Sun , Yuwei Wu , Subhrajit Bhattacharya , Vijay Kumar

Successfully navigating a complex environment to obtain a desired outcome is a difficult task, that up to recently was believed to be capable only by humans. This perception has been broken down over time, especially with the introduction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Joshua Hare

This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-17 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Dale Schuurmans

Reinforcement learning (RL) in long horizon and sparse reward tasks is notoriously difficult and requires a lot of training steps. A standard solution to speed up the process is to leverage additional reward signals, shaping it to better…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Thomas Carta , Pierre-Yves Oudeyer , Olivier Sigaud , Sylvain Lamprier

We present a map-less path planning algorithm based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for mobile robots navigating in unknown environment that only relies on 40-dimensional raw laser data and odometry information. The planner is trained…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-02-12 Nicolò Botteghi , Beril Sirmacek , Khaled A. A. Mustafa , Mannes Poel , Stefano Stramigioli

Current reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) pipelines for large language model (LLM) alignment typically assign scalar rewards to sequences, using the final token as a surrogate indicator for the quality of the entire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Ryan Koo , Ian Yang , Vipul Raheja , Mingyi Hong , Kwang-Sung Jun , Dongyeop Kang

Efficient and effective learning is one of the ultimate goals of the deep reinforcement learning (DRL), although the compromise has been made in most of the time, especially for the application of robot manipulations. Learning is always…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Yongle Luo , Kun Dong , Lili Zhao , Zhiyong Sun , Chao Zhou , Bo Song

Sparse and delayed reward functions pose a significant obstacle for real-world Reinforcement Learning (RL) applications. In this work, we propose Attention-based REward Shaping (ARES), a general and robust algorithm which uses a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Ian Holmes , Min Chi

In order to provide adaptive and user-friendly solutions to robotic manipulation, it is important that the agent can learn to accomplish tasks even if they are only provided with very sparse instruction signals. To address the issues…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Siyu Dai , Wei Xu , Andreas Hofmann , Brian Williams

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely deployed across numerous fields. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) leverages reward models (RMs) as proxies for human preferences to align LLM behaviors with human values, making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Shuyi Zhang , Wei Shi , Sihang Li , Jiayi Liao , Hengxing Cai , Xiang Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a powerful framework to address the discrepancy between loss functions used during training and the final evaluation metrics to be used at test time. When applied to neural Machine Translation (MT), it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Julia Ive , Zixu Wang , Marina Fomicheva , Lucia Specia

Dealing with environments with sparse rewards has always been crucial for systems developed to operate in autonomous open-ended learning settings. Intrinsic Motivations could be an effective way to help Deep Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Gianluca Maselli , Vieri Giuliano Santucci

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is sample-efficient but struggles in sparse reward settings. A critical bottleneck arises from the lack of informative gradients in sparse settings, where standard reward models often yield flat…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yao-Hui Li , Zeyu Wang , Xin Li , Wei Pang , Yingfang Yuan , Zhengkun Chen , Boya Zhang , Riashat Islam , Alex Lamb , Yonggang Zhang

The potential benefits of model-free reinforcement learning to real robotics systems are limited by its uninformed exploration that leads to slow convergence, lack of data-efficiency, and unnecessary interactions with the environment. To…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Yuchen Wu , Melissa Mozifian , Florian Shkurti

For task-oriented dialog systems, training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based Dialog Management module suffers from low sample efficiency and slow convergence speed due to the sparse rewards in RL.To solve this problem, many strategies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Zhengxu Hou , Bang Liu , Ruihui Zhao , Zijing Ou , Yafei Liu , Xi Chen , Yefeng Zheng

Designing effective reward functions remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, especially in multi-objective environments. In this work, we propose Multi-Objective Reward Shaping with Exploration (MORSE), a general framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Yuqing Xie , Jiayu Chen , Wenhao Tang , Ya Zhang , Chao Yu , Yu Wang

The broader application of reinforcement learning (RL) is limited by challenges including data efficiency, generalization capability, and ability to learn in sparse-reward environments. Meta-learning has emerged as a promising approach to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Octavio Pappalardo , Rodrigo Ramele , Juan Miguel Santos

Deep reinforcement learning has proven remarkably useful in training agents from unstructured data. However, the opacity of the produced agents makes it difficult to ensure that they adhere to various requirements posed by human engineers.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Raz Yerushalmi , Guy Amir , Achiya Elyasaf , David Harel , Guy Katz , Assaf Marron

While deep reinforcement learning techniques have led to agents that are successfully able to learn to perform a number of tasks that had been previously unlearnable, these techniques are still susceptible to the longstanding problem of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Nicholas Waytowich , Sean L. Barton , Vernon Lawhern , Garrett Warnell