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Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents are trained through trial-and-error interactions with the environment. This leads to a long training time for dense neural networks to achieve good performance. Hence, prohibitive computation and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-09 Ghada Sokar , Elena Mocanu , Decebal Constantin Mocanu , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Peter Stone

Structured dilated attention has an appealing inference-time efficiency knob: it reduces the FLOPs of attention and the KV cache size by a factor of the dilation size D, while preserving long-range connectivity. While prior work studies it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Xiuying Wei , Caglar Gulcehre

We study reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which agents observe the reward or transition realizations at their current state before deciding which action to take. Such observations are available in many applications, including…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Nadav Merlis

Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the careful design of the reward function. However, accurately assigning rewards to each state-action pair in Long-Term Reinforcement Learning (LTRL) tasks remains a significant challenge. As a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Qi Ju , Falin Hei , Zhemei Fang , Yunfeng Luo

Learning effective policies for sparse objectives is a key challenge in Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). A common approach is to design task-related dense rewards to improve task learnability. While such rewards are easily interpreted,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-12 Hassam Sheikh , Shauharda Khadka , Santiago Miret , Somdeb Majumdar

Apprenticeship learning (AL) is a process of inducing effective decision-making policies via observing and imitating experts' demonstrations. Most existing AL approaches, however, are not designed to cope with the evolving reward functions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Xi Yang , Ge Gao , Min Chi

Reinforcement learning usually uses the feedback rewards of environmental to train agents. But the rewards in the actual environment are sparse, and even some environments will not rewards. Most of the current methods are difficult to get…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-13 Kai Jiang , XiaoLong Qin

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a central problem in artificial intelligence. This problem consists of defining artificial agents that can learn optimal behaviour by interacting with an environment -- where the optimal behaviour is defined…

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a prevalent and effective methodology for real-world recommender systems, enabling learning policies from historical data and capturing user preferences. In offline RL, reward shaping…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Wenzheng Shu , Yanxiang Zeng , Yongxiang Tang , Teng Sha , Ning Luo , Yanhua Cheng , Xialong Liu , Fan Zhou , Peng Jiang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is central to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it introduces a critical vulnerability: an imperfect Reward Model (RM) can become a single point of failure when it fails to penalize…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Jiacheng Liang , Yao Ma , Tharindu Kumarage , Satyapriya Krishna , Rahul Gupta , Kai-Wei Chang , Aram Galstyan , Charith Peris

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

Potential-based reward shaping is commonly used to incorporate prior knowledge of how to solve the task into reinforcement learning because it can formally guarantee policy invariance. As such, the optimal policy and the ordering of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Henrik Müller , Daniel Kudenko

Despite the fact that deep reinforcement learning (RL) has surpassed human-level performances in various tasks, it still has several fundamental challenges. First, most RL methods require intensive data from the exploration of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Zhe Xu , Bo Wu , Aditya Ojha , Daniel Neider , Ufuk Topcu

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has recently spread into a range of domains within physics and engineering, with multiple remarkable achievements. Still, much remains to be explored before the capabilities of these methods are well…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2020-12-22 Jonathan Viquerat , Jean Rabault , Alexander Kuhnle , Hassan Ghraieb , Aurélien Larcher , Elie Hachem

Reinforcement learning (RL) has transformed sequential decision making, yet traditional algorithms like Deep Q-Networks (DQNs) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) often struggle with efficient exploration, stability, and adaptability in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Umberto Gonçalves de Sousa

Sparse rewards pose a significant challenge to achieving high sample efficiency in goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, in sequential manipulation tasks, the agent receives failure rewards until it successfully…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Yuming Huang , Bin Ren , Ziming Xu , Lianghong Wu

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

Reinforcement learning is a powerful learning paradigm in which agents can learn to maximize sparse and delayed reward signals. Although RL has had many impressive successes in complex domains, learning can take hours, days, or even years…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Paniz Behboudian , Yash Satsangi , Matthew E. Taylor , Anna Harutyunyan , Michael Bowling

Offline Reinforcement Learning (ORL) offers a robust solution to training agents in applications where interactions with the environment must be strictly limited due to cost, safety, or lack of accurate simulation environments. Despite its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Carlo Romeo , Andrew D. Bagdanov

We present RLSS: a reinforcement learning algorithm for sequential scene generation. This is based on employing the proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm for generative problems. In particular, we consider how to effectively reduce…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Azimkhon Ostonov , Peter Wonka , Dominik L. Michels