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It has been a recent trend to leverage the power of supervised learning (SL) towards more effective reinforcement learning (RL) methods. We propose a novel phasic approach by alternating online RL and offline SL for tackling sparse-reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-27 Yunfei Li , Tian Gao , Jiaqi Yang , Huazhe Xu , Yi Wu

Reward modeling is central to alignment pipelines such as RLHF, RLAIF, and PPO-based policy optimization, yet its reliability is constrained by limited and heterogeneous human preference data that are expensive to collect at scale. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Payel Bhattacharjee , Osvaldo Simeone , Ravi Tandon

In this paper, we study cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) where the joint reward exhibits submodularity, which is a natural property capturing diminishing marginal returns when adding agents to a team. Unlike standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Wenjing Chen , Chengyuan Qian , Shuo Xing , Yi Zhou , Victoria Crawford

In this work, we consider the problem of collaborative multi-user reinforcement learning. In this setting there are multiple users with the same state-action space and transition probabilities but with different rewards. Under the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-23 Naman Agarwal , Prateek Jain , Suhas Kowshik , Dheeraj Nagaraj , Praneeth Netrapalli

Autonomous parking (AP) represents a critical yet complex subset of intelligent vehicle automation, characterized by tight spatial constraints, frequent close-range obstacle interactions, and stringent safety margins. However, conventional…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Ahmad Suleman , Misha Urooj Khan , Zeeshan Kaleem , Ali H. Alenezi , Iqra Shabbir , Sinem Coleri , Chau Yuen

Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Meng Cao , Lei Shu , Lei Yu , Yun Zhu , Nevan Wichers , Yinxiao Liu , Lei Meng

Reinforcement learning provides an automated framework for learning behaviors from high-level reward specifications, but in practice the choice of reward function can be crucial for good results -- while in principle the reward only needs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Abhishek Gupta , Aldo Pacchiano , Yuexiang Zhai , Sham M. Kakade , Sergey Levine

Process rewards have been widely used in deep reinforcement learning to improve training efficiency, reduce variance, and prevent reward hacking. In LLM reasoning, existing works also explore various solutions for learning effective process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Xian Wu , Kaijie Zhu , Ying Zhang , Lun Wang , Wenbo Guo

Efficient exploration in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a challenging problem when receiving only a team reward, especially in environments with sparse rewards. A powerful method to mitigate this issue involves crafting dense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Xuefei Wu , Xiao Yin , Yuanyang Zhu , Chunlin Chen

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

Designing reinforcement learning (RL) agents is typically a difficult process that requires numerous design iterations. Learning can fail for a multitude of reasons, and standard RL methods provide too few tools to provide insight into the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-24 James MacGlashan , Evan Archer , Alisa Devlic , Takuma Seno , Craig Sherstan , Peter R. Wurman , Peter Stone

Multi-agent reinforcement learning involves multiple agents interacting with each other and a shared environment to complete tasks. When rewards provided by the environment are sparse, agents may not receive immediate feedback on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-31 Baicen Xiao , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Radha Poovendran

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms often struggle to find strategies close to Pareto optimal Nash Equilibrium, owing largely to the lack of efficient exploration. The problem is exacerbated in sparse-reward settings,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Zhicheng Zhang , Yancheng Liang , Yi Wu , Fei Fang

Active learning strategies aim to train high-performance models with minimal labeled data by selecting the most informative instances for labeling. However, existing methods for assessing data informativeness often fail to align directly…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Zhixuan Liang , Xingyu Zeng , Rui Zhao , Ping Luo

Mastering robotic manipulation skills through reinforcement learning (RL) typically requires the design of shaped reward functions. Recent developments in this area have demonstrated that using sparse rewards, i.e. rewarding the agent only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-12 Ozsel Kilinc , Giovanni Montana

Reward shaping is effective in addressing the sparse-reward challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) by providing immediate feedback through auxiliary, informative rewards. Based on the reward shaping strategy, we propose a novel multi-task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Haozhe Ma , Zhengding Luo , Thanh Vinh Vo , Kuankuan Sima , Tze-Yun Leong

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Minjae Cho , Huy Trong Tran

We study the policy evaluation problem in an online multi-reward multi-policy discounted setting, where multiple reward functions must be evaluated simultaneously for different policies. We adopt an $(\epsilon,\delta)$-PAC perspective to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Alessio Russo , Aldo Pacchiano

In tabular multi-agent reinforcement learning with average-cost criterion, a team of agents sequentially interacts with the environment and observes local incentives. We focus on the case that the global reward is a sum of local rewards,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-26 Alec Koppel , Amrit Singh Bedi , Bhargav Ganguly , Vaneet Aggarwal

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) usually assumes the reward function model is pre-specified as a weighted sum of features and estimates the weighting parameters only. However, how to select features and determine a proper reward model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Chendi Qu , Jianping He , Xiaoming Duan , Jiming Chen