English
Related papers

Related papers: LLM-Driven Intrinsic Motivation for Sparse Reward …

200 papers

Large language model alignment via reinforcement learning depends critically on reward function quality. However, static, domain-specific reward models are often costly to train and exhibit poor generalization in out-of-distribution…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Andrew Zhuoer Feng , Cunxiang Wang , Bosi Wen , Yidong Wang , Yu Luo , Hongning Wang , Minlie Huang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has advanced the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs), enabling autonomous agents that can conduct effective multi-turn and tool-integrated reasoning. While instructions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Han Zhou , Xingchen Wan , Ivan Vulić , Anna Korhonen

In the absence of external rewards, agents can still learn useful behaviors by identifying and mastering a set of diverse skills within their environment. Existing skill learning methods use mutual information objectives to incentivize each…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Kate Baumli , David Warde-Farley , Steven Hansen , Volodymyr Mnih

Reinforcement learning (RL) often encounters delayed and sparse feedback in real-world applications, even with only episodic rewards. Previous approaches have made some progress in reward redistribution for credit assignment but still face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-10 Yun Qu , Yuhang Jiang , Boyuan Wang , Yixiu Mao , Cheems Wang , Chang Liu , Xiangyang Ji

Multi-goal reinforcement learning (RL) aims to qualify the agent to accomplish multi-goal tasks, which is of great importance in learning scalable robotic manipulation skills. However, reward engineering always requires strenuous efforts in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Deyu Yang , Hanbo Zhang , Xuguang Lan , Jishiyu Ding

In robotic systems, the performance of reinforcement learning depends on the rationality of predefined reward functions. However, manually designed reward functions often lead to policy failures due to inaccuracies. Inverse Reinforcement…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Yongkai Tian , Yirong Qi , Xin Yu , Wenjun Wu , Jie Luo

We propose a multi-agent distributed reinforcement learning algorithm that balances between potentially conflicting short-term reward and sparse, delayed long-term reward, and learns with partial information in a dynamic environment. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-06 Jing Tan , Ramin Khalili , Holger Karl

There has been significant progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) in recent years. Nevertheless, finding suitable hyperparameter configurations and reward functions remains challenging even for experts, and performance heavily relies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Julian Dierkes , Emma Cramer , Holger H. Hoos , Sebastian Trimpe

Multi-agent learning is a promising method to simulate aggregate competitive behaviour in finance. Learning expert agents' reward functions through their external demonstrations is hence particularly relevant for subsequent design of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-13 Jacobo Roa-Vicens , Cyrine Chtourou , Angelos Filos , Francisco Rullan , Yarin Gal , Ricardo Silva

Empowerment is an information-theoretic method that can be used to intrinsically motivate learning agents. It attempts to maximize an agent's control over the environment by encouraging visiting states with a large number of reachable next…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-09 Felix Leibfried , Sergio Pascual-Diaz , Jordi Grau-Moya

Information theoretic sensor management approaches are an ideal solution to state estimation problems when considering the optimal control of multi-agent systems, however they are too computationally intensive for large state spaces,…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-02-02 William A. Dawson , Ruben Glatt , Edward Rusu , Braden C. Soper , Ryan A. Goldhahn

Agents built with large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential across a wide range of domains. However, in complex decision-making tasks, pure LLM-based agents tend to exhibit intrinsic bias in their choice of actions, which is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Zelai Xu , Chao Yu , Fei Fang , Yu Wang , Yi Wu

Latent learning, classically theorized by Tolman, shows that biological agents (e.g., rats) can acquire internal representations of their environment without rewards, enabling rapid adaptation once rewards are introduced. In contrast, from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jian Xiong , Jingbo Zhou , Zihan Zhou , Yixiong Xiao , Le Zhang , Jingyong Ye , Rui Qian , Yang Zhou , Dejing Dou

The reinforcement learning (RL) research area is very active, with an important number of new contributions; especially considering the emergent field of deep RL (DRL). However a number of scientific and technical challenges still need to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-20 Arthur Aubret , Laetitia Matignon , Salima Hassas

Using learned reward functions (LRFs) as a means to solve sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) tasks has yielded some steady progress in task-complexity through the years. In this work, we question whether today's LRFs are best-suited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-24 Ademi Adeniji , Amber Xie , Carmelo Sferrazza , Younggyo Seo , Stephen James , Pieter Abbeel

Recent trends in Reinforcement Learning (RL) highlight the need for agents to learn from reward-free interactions and alternative supervision signals, such as unlabeled or incomplete demonstrations, rather than relying solely on explicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Elias Malomgré , Pieter Simoens

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is essential for evolving Large Language Models (LLMs) into autonomous agents capable of long-horizon planning, yet a practical recipe for scaling RL in complex, multi-turn environments remains elusive. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Xixi Wu , Qianguo Sun , Ruiyang Zhang , Chao Song , Junlong Wu , Yiyan Qi , Hong Cheng

One of the key challenges in current Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based Automated Driving (AD) agents is achieving flexible, precise, and human-like behavior cost-effectively. This paper introduces an innovative approach that uses large…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Ziqi Zhou , Jingyue Zhang , Jingyuan Zhang , Yangfan He , Boyue Wang , Tianyu Shi , Alaa Khamis

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular approach for robotic path planning in uncertain environments. However, the control policies trained for an RL agent crucially depend on user-defined, state-based reward functions. Poorly designed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-05 Anand Balakrishnan , Stefan Jakšić , Edgar A. Aguilar , Dejan Ničković , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh