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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…

Providing densely shaped reward functions for RL algorithms is often exceedingly challenging, motivating the development of RL algorithms that can learn from easier-to-specify sparse reward functions. This sparsity poses new exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-24 Albert Wilcox , Ashwin Balakrishna , Jules Dedieu , Wyame Benslimane , Daniel S. Brown , Ken Goldberg

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has significantly improved LLM reasoning, but its sparse, outcome-based reward provides no guidance for intermediate steps, slowing exploration. We propose Progressively Ascending…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Eunseop Yoon , Hee Suk Yoon , Jaehyun Jang , SooHwan Eom , Qi Dai , Chong Luo , Mark A. Hasegawa-Johnson , Chang D. Yoo

Many reinforcement learning environments (e.g., Minecraft) provide only sparse rewards that indicate task completion or failure with binary values. The challenge in exploration efficiency in such environments makes it difficult for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Hao Li , Xue Yang , Zhaokai Wang , Xizhou Zhu , Jie Zhou , Yu Qiao , Xiaogang Wang , Hongsheng Li , Lewei Lu , Jifeng Dai

The potential of reinforcement learning (RL) to deliver aligned and performant agents is partially bottlenecked by the reward engineering problem. One alternative to heuristic trial-and-error is preference-based RL (PbRL), where a reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Tom Bewley , Freddy Lecue

Process reward models (PRMs) that provide dense, step-level feedback have shown promise for reinforcement learning, yet their adoption remains limited by the need for expensive step-level annotations or ground truth references. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Salman Rahman , Sruthi Gorantla , Arpit Gupta , Swastik Roy , Nanyun Peng , Yang Liu

Sparse and delayed rewards pose a challenge to single agent reinforcement learning. This challenge is amplified in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) where credit assignment of these rewards needs to happen not only across time, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Jennifer She , Jayesh K. Gupta , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Self-paced reinforcement learning (RL) aims to improve the data efficiency of learning by automatically creating sequences, namely curricula, of probability distributions over contexts. However, existing techniques for self-paced RL fail in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Cevahir Koprulu , Ufuk Topcu

In this paper, we propose a novel framework for designing a fast convergent multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL)-based medium access control (MAC) protocol operating in a single cell scenario. The user equipments (UEs) are cast as…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Luciano Miuccio , Salvatore Riolo , Mehdi Bennis , Daniela Panno

Deep reinforcement learning has obtained significant breakthroughs in recent years. Most methods in deep-RL achieve good results via the maximization of the reward signal provided by the environment, typically in the form of discounted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-10 Yubin Deng , Ke Yu , Dahua Lin , Xiaoou Tang , Chen Change Loy

Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Max Simchowitz , Tiancheng Yu

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…

Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) models are vulnerable in various noisy scenarios. For instance, the observed reward channel is often subject to noise in practice (e.g., when rewards are collected through sensors),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-04 Jingkang Wang , Yang Liu , Bo Li

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 algorithms often suffer from slow convergence due to sparse reward signals, particularly in complex environments where feedback is delayed or infrequent. This paper introduces the Psychological Regret Model (PRM), a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Zhe Xu

Recent RL methods have substantially improved the reasoning abilities of LLMs. Existing reward designs mainly follow two paradigms: (1) Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) derives outcome signals from executable checks or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Sirui Chen , Lei Xu , Yuying Zhao , Yutian Chen , Yu Wang , Beier Zhu , Hanwang Zhang , Shengjie Zhao , Chaochao Lu

The Inverse Reinforcement Learning (\textit{IRL}) problem has seen rapid evolution in the past few years, with important applications in domains like robotics, cognition, and health. In this work, we explore the inefficacy of current IRL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-28 Raeid Saqur

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

Tool-augmented LLM systems expose a control regime that learning theory has largely ignored: sequential decision-making with a massive discrete action universe (tools, APIs, documents) in which only a small, unknown subset is relevant for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Angshul Majumdar

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Simone Parisi , Davide Tateo , Maximilian Hensel , Carlo D'Eramo , Jan Peters , Joni Pajarinen