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The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the efficacy of using Contrastive Random Walk as a curiosity method to achieve faster convergence to the optimal policy.Contrastive Random Walk defines the transition matrix of a random walk with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Zixuan Pan , Zihao Wei , Yidong Huang , Aditya Gupta

Controlled text generation tasks such as unsupervised text style transfer have increasingly adopted the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL). A major challenge in applying RL to such tasks is the sparse reward, which is available only after…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-19 Bhargav Upadhyay , Akhilesh Sudhakar , Arjun Maheswaran

Variance reduction methods such as SVRG and SpiderBoost use a mixture of large and small batch gradients to reduce the variance of stochastic gradients. Compared to SGD, these methods require at least double the number of operations per…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-28 Melih Elibol , Lihua Lei , Michael I. Jordan

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) has gained much attention for its ability to learn complex behaviors in a sample-efficient way: planning actions by generating imaginary trajectories with predicted rewards. Despite its success, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Vint Lee , Pieter Abbeel , Youngwoon Lee

Sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) remains fundamentally hard: without structure, any agent needs $\Omega(|\mathcal{S}||\mathcal{A}|/p)$ samples to recover rewards. We introduce Policy-Aware Matrix Completion (PAMC) as a first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Ibne Farabi Shihab , Sanjeda Akter , Anuj Sharma

While large language models excel in diverse domains, their performance on complex longhorizon agentic decision-making tasks remains limited. Most existing methods concentrate on designing effective reward models (RMs) to advance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Zhicong Lu , Zichuan Lin , Wei Jia , Changyuan Tian , Deheng Ye , Peiguang Li , Li Jin , Nayu Liu , Guangluan Xu , Wei Feng

Sparse data is fundamental to scientific simulations in biology and physics, from single-cell gene expression to particle calorimetry, where exact zeros encode physical absence rather than weak signal. However, existing diffusion models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Phil Ostheimer , Mayank Nagda , Andriy Balinskyy , Jean Radig , Carl Herrmann , Stephan Mandt , Marius Kloft , Sophie Fellenz

Sample inefficiency is a long-lasting challenge in deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Despite dramatic improvements have been made, the problem is far from being solved and is especially challenging in environments with sparse or delayed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Federico Malato , Ville Hautamaki

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in text-to-image generation. However, their practical applications are hindered by the misalignment between generated images and corresponding text prompts. To tackle this issue,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-28 Zijing Hu , Fengda Zhang , Long Chen , Kun Kuang , Jiahui Li , Kaifeng Gao , Jun Xiao , Xin Wang , Wenwu Zhu

Particle dynamics and multi-agent systems provide accurate dynamical models for studying and forecasting the behavior of complex interacting systems. They often take the form of a high-dimensional system of differential equations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-09 Yuxuan Liu , Scott G. McCalla , Hayden Schaeffer

Multi-task representation learning (MTRL) is an approach that learns shared latent representations across related tasks, facilitating collaborative learning that improves the overall learning efficiency. This paper studies MTRL for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yaoze Guo , Shana Moothedath

Reliable reward models (RMs) are critical for ensuring the safe alignment of large language models (LLMs). However, current RM evaluation methods focus solely on preference perception accuracies in given specific scenarios, obscuring the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Jianxiang Zang , Yongda Wei , Ruxue Bai , Shiyu Jiang , Nijia Mo , Binhong Li , Qiang Sun , Hui Liu

Research in machine learning is making progress in fixing its own reproducibility crisis. Reinforcement learning (RL), in particular, faces its own set of unique challenges. Comparison of point estimates, and plots that show successful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Ted Fujimoto , Joshua Suetterlein , Samrat Chatterjee , Auroop Ganguly

We introduce Reward-Guided Speculative Decoding (RSD), a novel framework aimed at improving the efficiency of inference in large language models (LLMs). RSD synergistically combines a lightweight draft model with a more powerful target…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Baohao Liao , Yuhui Xu , Hanze Dong , Junnan Li , Christof Monz , Silvio Savarese , Doyen Sahoo , Caiming Xiong

Exploration in sparse reward environments remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning, particularly in Contextual Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs), where environments differ across episodes. Existing episodic intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Yuhua Jiang , Qihan Liu , Yiqin Yang , Xiaoteng Ma , Dianyu Zhong , Hao Hu , Jun Yang , Bin Liang , Bo Xu , Chongjie Zhang , Qianchuan Zhao

Density ratio estimation (DRE) is a paramount task in machine learning, for its broad applications across multiple domains, such as covariate shift adaptation, causal inference, independence tests and beyond. Parametric methods for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-03 Meilin Wang , Wei Huang , Mingming Gong , Zheng Zhang

Multi-agent reinforcement learning involves multiple agents interacting with each other and a shared environment to complete tasks. When rewards provided by the environment are sparse, agents may not receive immediate feedback on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-31 Baicen Xiao , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Radha Poovendran

A common setting in multitask reinforcement learning (RL) demands that an agent rapidly adapt to various stationary reward functions randomly sampled from a fixed distribution. In such situations, the successor representation (SR) is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-08 Ted Moskovitz , Samo Hromadka , Ahmed Touati , Diana Borsa , Maneesh Sahani

Sparse residual tree (SRT) is an adaptive exploration method for multivariate scattered data approximation. It leads to sparse and stable approximations in areas where the data is sufficient or redundant, and points out the possible local…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2019-05-15 Xin Xu , Xiaopeng Luo

Disentangled representation learning aims to uncover latent variables underlying the observed data, and generally speaking, rather strong assumptions are needed to ensure identifiability. Some approaches rely on sufficient changes on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Zijian Li , Shunxing Fan , Yujia Zheng , Ignavier Ng , Shaoan Xie , Guangyi Chen , Xinshuai Dong , Ruichu Cai , Kun Zhang