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We propose a general and model-free approach for Reinforcement Learning (RL) on real robotics with sparse rewards. We build upon the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm to use demonstrations. Both demonstrations and actual…

We propose Scheduled Auxiliary Control (SAC-X), a new learning paradigm in the context of Reinforcement Learning (RL). SAC-X enables learning of complex behaviors - from scratch - in the presence of multiple sparse reward signals. To this…

Toddlers evolve from free exploration with sparse feedback to exploiting prior experiences for goal-directed learning with denser rewards. Drawing inspiration from this Toddler-Inspired Reward Transition, we set out to explore the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Junseok Park , Yoonsung Kim , Hee Bin Yoo , Min Whoo Lee , Kibeom Kim , Won-Seok Choi , Minsu Lee , Byoung-Tak Zhang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

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

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

Single-task RL agents are typically trained under a fixed reward function, which limits their robustness to reward misspecification and their ability to adapt to changing preferences. We introduce Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan , Pieter Abbeel

Unsupervised goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) is a promising paradigm for developing diverse robotic skills without external supervision. However, existing unsupervised GCRL methods often struggle to cover a wide range of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Junik Bae , Kwanyoung Park , Youngwoon Lee

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables policy learning from pre-collected datasets, avoiding costly and risky online interactions, but it often struggles with long-horizon tasks involving sparse rewards. Existing goal-conditioned and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Chengyang Gu , Yuxin Pan , Hui Xiong , Yize Chen

Efficient exploration for automatic subgoal discovery is a challenging problem in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL). In this paper, we show that intrinsic motivation learning increases the efficiency of exploration, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-25 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

In reinforcement learning (RL), sparse rewards are a natural way to specify the task to be learned. However, most RL algorithms struggle to learn in this setting since the learning signal is mostly zeros. In contrast, humans are good at…

Continually solving new, unsolved tasks is the key to learning diverse behaviors. Through reinforcement learning (RL), we have made massive strides towards solving tasks that have a single goal. However, in the multi-task domain, where an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Yunzhi Zhang , Pieter Abbeel , Lerrel Pinto

Search agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in tackling knowledge-intensive tasks. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for training these agents to perform…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Shiyu Li , Yang Tang , Yifan Wang , Peiming Li , Xi Chen

Deep reinforcement Learning for end-to-end driving is limited by the need of complex reward engineering. Sparse rewards can circumvent this challenge but suffers from long training time and leads to sub-optimal policy. In this work, we…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Pranav Agarwal , Pierre de Beaucorps , Raoul de Charette

Many continuous control tasks have easily formulated objectives, yet using them directly as a reward in reinforcement learning (RL) leads to suboptimal policies. Therefore, many classical control tasks guide RL training using complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-21 Aleksandra Faust , Anthony Francis , Dar Mehta

In this paper, we study the application of DRL algorithms in the context of local navigation problems, in which a robot moves towards a goal location in unknown and cluttered workspaces equipped only with limited-range exteroceptive…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Victor R. F. Miranda , Armando A. Neto , Gustavo M. Freitas , Leonardo A. Mozelli

Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Simone Parisi , Alireza Kazemipour , Michael Bowling

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are designed to optimize problem-solving by learning actions that maximize rewards, a task that becomes particularly challenging in random and nonstationary environments. Even advanced RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Sebastian Zieglmeier , Niklas Erdmann , Narada D. Warakagoda

Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the three basic paradigms of machine learning. It has demonstrated impressive performance in many complex tasks like Go and StarCraft, which is increasingly involved in smart manufacturing and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Mingqi Yuan