English
Related papers

Related papers: DISCOVER: Automated Curricula for Sparse-Reward Re…

200 papers

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

When searching for objects in cluttered environments, it is often necessary to perform complex interactions in order to move occluding objects out of the way and fully reveal the object of interest and make it graspable. Due to the…

Reinforcement learning (RL) for continuous control under delayed rewards is an under-explored problem despite its significance in real-world applications. Many complex skills are based on intermediate ones as prerequisites. For instance, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Bahareh Tasdighi , Manuel Haussmann , Nicklas Werge , Yi-Shan Wu , Melih Kandemir

We present a new model-based algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) which consists of explicit exploration and exploitation phases, and is applicable in large or infinite state spaces. The algorithm maintains a set of dynamics models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Mikael Henaff

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to balance exploiting the current best strategy with exploring new options that could lead to higher rewards. Most common RL algorithms use undirected exploration, i.e., select random sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Bhavya Sukhija , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause , Pieter Abbeel , Carmelo Sferrazza

The problem of sparse rewards is one of the hardest challenges in contemporary reinforcement learning. Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) tackles this problem by using a set of temporally-extended actions, or options, each of which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-14 Nat Dilokthanakul , Christos Kaplanis , Nick Pawlowski , Murray Shanahan

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) can acquire complex behaviors from low-level inputs, such as images. However, real-world applications of such methods require generalizing to the vast variability of the real world. Deep networks are known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-13 Chelsea Finn , Tianhe Yu , Justin Fu , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

Curriculum design for reinforcement learning (RL) can speed up an agent's learning process and help it learn to perform well on complex tasks. However, existing techniques typically require domain-specific hyperparameter tuning, involve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Georgios Tzannetos , Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Adish Singla

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

Learning to solve complex goal-oriented tasks with sparse terminal-only rewards often requires an enormous number of samples. In such cases, using a set of expert trajectories could help to learn faster. However, Imitation Learning (IL) via…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Sujoy Paul , Jeroen van Baar , Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a crucial paradigm for incentivizing reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). Due to vast state-action spaces and reward sparsity in reasoning tasks,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Zican Hu , Shilin Zhang , Yafu Li , Jianhao Yan , Xuyang Hu , Leyang Cui , Xiaoye Qu , Chunlin Chen , Yu Cheng , Zhi Wang

The navigation problem is classically approached in two steps: an exploration step, where map-information about the environment is gathered; and an exploitation step, where this information is used to navigate efficiently. Deep…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-01-08 Vikas Dhiman , Shurjo Banerjee , Brent Griffin , Jeffrey M Siskind , Jason J Corso

Efficient exploration is one of the main challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Most existing sample-efficient algorithms assume the existence of a single reward function during exploration. In many practical scenarios, however, there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Xuezhou Zhang , Yuzhe ma , Adish Singla

Building trust in reinforcement learning (RL) agents requires understanding why they make certain decisions, especially in high-stakes applications like robotics, healthcare, and finance. Existing explainability methods often focus on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Rishav Rishav , Somjit Nath , Vincent Michalski , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework which is suitable for both the batch RL setting and the setting where there are many reward functions of interest. During the exploration phase, an agent collects samples without using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ruosong Wang , Simon S. Du , Lin F. Yang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

A major challenge in real-world reinforcement learning (RL) is the sparsity of reward feedback. Often, what is available is an intuitive but sparse reward function that only indicates whether the task is completed partially or fully.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Desik Rengarajan , Gargi Vaidya , Akshay Sarvesh , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai

Linear temporal logic (LTL) is a powerful language for task specification in reinforcement learning, as it allows describing objectives beyond the expressivity of conventional discounted return formulations. Nonetheless, recent works have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Marco Bagatella , Andreas Krause , Georg Martius

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

This paper studies reward-agnostic exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) -- a scenario where the learner is unware of the reward functions during the exploration stage -- and designs an algorithm that improves over the state of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Gen Li , Yuling Yan , Yuxin Chen , Jianqing Fan