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While unsupervised skill discovery has shown promise in autonomously acquiring behavioral primitives, there is still a large methodological disconnect between task-agnostic skill pretraining and downstream, task-aware finetuning. We present…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Ademi Adeniji , Amber Xie , Pieter Abbeel

Efficient exploration in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a challenging problem when receiving only a team reward, especially in environments with sparse rewards. A powerful method to mitigate this issue involves crafting dense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Xuefei Wu , Xiao Yin , Yuanyang Zhu , Chunlin Chen

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

This paper investigates the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to multi-robot social formation navigation, a critical capability for enabling seamless human-robot coexistence. While RL offers a promising paradigm, the inherent…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Hao Fu , Wei Liu , Shuai Zhou

Exploration under sparse reward is a long-standing challenge of model-free reinforcement learning. The state-of-the-art methods address this challenge by introducing intrinsic rewards to encourage exploration in novel states or uncertain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-05 Daochen Zha , Wenye Ma , Lei Yuan , Xia Hu , Ji Liu

Recent studies show that LLM hidden states encode reward-related information, such as answer correctness and model confidence. However, existing approaches typically fit black-box probes on the full hidden states, offering little insight…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Guowei Xu , Mert Yuksekgonul , James Zou

In spite of the success of existing meta reinforcement learning methods, they still have difficulty in learning a meta policy effectively for RL problems with sparse reward. In this respect, we develop a novel meta reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Yun Hua , Xiangfeng Wang , Bo Jin , Wenhao Li , Junchi Yan , Xiaofeng He , Hongyuan Zha

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently proven great success in various domains. Yet, the design of the reward function requires detailed domain expertise and tedious fine-tuning to ensure that agents are able to learn the desired…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Murad Dawood , Nils Dengler , Jorge de Heuvel , Maren Bennewitz

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

Exogenous state variables and rewards can slow reinforcement learning by injecting uncontrolled variation into the reward signal. This paper formalizes exogenous state variables and rewards and shows that if the reward function decomposes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 George Trimponias , Thomas G. Dietterich

Deep Reinforcement Learning is a promising tool for robotic control, yet practical application is often hindered by the difficulty of designing effective reward functions. Real-world tasks typically require optimizing multiple objectives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Kilian Freitag , Knut Åkesson , Morteza Haghir Chehreghani

In many real-world scenarios, reward signal for agents are exceedingly sparse, making it challenging to learn an effective reward function for reward shaping. To address this issue, the proposed approach in this paper performs reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Wenyun Li , Wenjie Huang , Chen Sun

Intrinsic rewards can improve exploration in reinforcement learning, but the exploration process may suffer from instability caused by non-stationary reward shaping and strong dependency on hyperparameters. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Lukas Schäfer , Filippos Christianos , Josiah P. Hanna , Stefano V. Albrecht

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

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a key approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, prevalent RL approaches like proximal policy optimization and group relative policy optimization suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jingtong Gao , Ling Pan , Yejing Wang , Rui Zhong , Chi Lu , Maolin Wang , Qingpeng Cai , Peng Jiang , Xiangyu Zhao

General-purpose planning algorithms for automated driving combine mission, behavior, and local motion planning. Such planning algorithms map features of the environment and driving kinematics into complex reward functions. To achieve this,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-09-17 Sascha Rosbach , Vinit James , Simon Großjohann , Silviu Homoceanu , Xing Li , Stefan Roth

In environments with sparse rewards, finding a good inductive bias for exploration is crucial to the agent's success. However, there are two competing goals: novelty search and systematic exploration. While existing approaches such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Stefan Sylvius Wagner , Peter Arndt , Jan Robine , Stefan Harmeling

Many scenes in real life can be abstracted to the sparse reward visual scenes, where it is difficult for an agent to tackle the task under the condition of only accepting images and sparse rewards. We propose to decompose this problem into…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Zheng Fang , Biao Zhao , Guizhong Liu

Sparse reward problems are one of the biggest challenges in Reinforcement Learning. Goal-directed tasks are one such sparse reward problems where a reward signal is received only when the goal is reached. One promising way to train an agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Ameet Deshpande , Srikanth Sarma , Ashutosh Jha , Balaraman Ravindran