English
Related papers

Related papers: Shaping Sparse Rewards in Reinforcement Learning: …

200 papers

In the search for more sample-efficient reinforcement-learning (RL) algorithms, a promising direction is to leverage as much external off-policy data as possible. For instance, expert demonstrations. In the past, multiple ideas have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Jesus Bujalance Martin , Fabien Moutarde

Rewards play an essential role in reinforcement learning. In contrast to rule-based game environments with well-defined reward functions, complex real-world robotic applications, such as contact-rich manipulation, lack explicit and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-30 Yuning Wu , Jieliang Luo , Hui Li

A promising technique for exploration is to maximize the entropy of visited state distribution, i.e., state entropy, by encouraging uniform coverage of visited state space. While it has been effective for an unsupervised setup, it tends to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Dongyoung Kim , Jinwoo Shin , Pieter Abbeel , Younggyo Seo

Recent trends in Reinforcement Learning (RL) highlight the need for agents to learn from reward-free interactions and alternative supervision signals, such as unlabeled or incomplete demonstrations, rather than relying solely on explicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Elias Malomgré , Pieter Simoens

In this paper we consider reinforcement learning tasks with progressive rewards; that is, tasks where the rewards tend to increase in magnitude over time. We hypothesise that this property may be problematic for value-based deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-30 Michael Dann , John Thangarajah

To rapidly learn a new task, it is often essential for agents to explore efficiently -- especially when performance matters from the first timestep. One way to learn such behaviour is via meta-learning. Many existing methods however rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-11 Luisa Zintgraf , Leo Feng , Cong Lu , Maximilian Igl , Kristian Hartikainen , Katja Hofmann , Shimon Whiteson

Applying reinforcement learning (RL) to sparse reward domains is notoriously challenging due to insufficient guiding signals. Common RL techniques for addressing such domains include (1) learning from demonstrations and (2) curriculum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-29 Vaibhav Bajaj , Guni Sharon , Peter Stone

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have exhibited great potential in solving single-task sequential decision-making problems with high-dimensional observations and long horizons, but are known to be hard to generalize across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Boyuan Chen , Chuning Zhu , Pulkit Agrawal , Kaiqing Zhang , Abhishek Gupta

The aim of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world applications is to create systems capable of making autonomous decisions by learning from their environment through trial and error. This paper emphasizes the importance of reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Sinan Ibrahim , Mostafa Mostafa , Ali Jnadi , Hadi Salloum , Pavel Osinenko

It has been a recent trend to leverage the power of supervised learning (SL) towards more effective reinforcement learning (RL) methods. We propose a novel phasic approach by alternating online RL and offline SL for tackling sparse-reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-27 Yunfei Li , Tian Gao , Jiaqi Yang , Huazhe Xu , Yi Wu

Interactive reinforcement learning has shown promise in learning complex robotic tasks. However, the process can be human-intensive due to the requirement of a large amount of interactive feedback. This paper presents a new method that uses…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-08 Shukai Liu , Chenming Wu , Ying Li , Liangjun Zhang

While deep reinforcement learning excels at solving tasks where large amounts of data can be collected through virtually unlimited interaction with the environment, learning from limited interaction remains a key challenge. We posit that an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Max Schwarzer , Ankesh Anand , Rishab Goel , R Devon Hjelm , Aaron Courville , Philip Bachman

Supervised contour detection methods usually require many labeled training images to obtain satisfactory performance. However, a large set of annotated data might be unavailable or extremely labor intensive. In this paper, we investigate…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2016-05-18 Zizhao Zhang , Fuyong Xing , Xiaoshuang Shi , Lin Yang

Extending large language models (LLMs) to low-resource languages often incurs an "alignment tax": improvements in the target language come at the cost of catastrophic forgetting in general capabilities. We argue that this trade-off arises…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Zeli Su , Ziyin Zhang , Zhou Liu , Xuexian Song , Zhankai Xu , Longfei Zheng , Xiaolu Zhang , Rong Fu , Guixian Xu , Wentao Zhang

Learning to imitate expert behavior from demonstrations can be challenging, especially in environments with high-dimensional, continuous observations and unknown dynamics. Supervised learning methods based on behavioral cloning (BC) suffer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-27 Siddharth Reddy , Anca D. Dragan , Sergey Levine

In reinforcement learning (RL), the ability to utilize prior knowledge from previously solved tasks can allow agents to quickly solve new problems. In some cases, these new problems may be approximately solved by composing the solutions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-02 Jacob Adamczyk , Argenis Arriojas , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

Reward functions are central in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding agents towards optimal decision-making. The complexity of RL tasks requires meticulously designed reward functions that effectively drive learning while avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Rati Devidze

Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is an approach wherein the experience gained from solving a variety of tasks is distilled into a meta-policy. The meta-policy, when adapted over only a small (or just a single) number of steps, is able…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-28 Desik Rengarajan , Sapana Chaudhary , Jaewon Kim , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai

Conventional video summarization approaches based on reinforcement learning have the problem that the reward can only be received after the whole summary is generated. Such kind of reward is sparse and it makes reinforcement learning hard…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Yiyan Chen , Li Tao , Xueting Wang , Toshihiko Yamasaki

Exploration in complex domains is a key challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks with very sparse rewards. Recent successes in deep reinforcement learning have been achieved mostly using simple heuristic exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-07 Joshua Achiam , Shankar Sastry