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This work re-examines the commonly held assumption that the frequency of rewards is a reliable measure of task difficulty in reinforcement learning. We identify and formalize a structural challenge that undermines the effectiveness of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Yannick Molinghen , Tom Lenaerts

A core aspect of human intelligence is the ability to learn new tasks quickly and switch between them flexibly. Here, we describe a modular continual reinforcement learning paradigm inspired by these abilities. We first introduce a visual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-13 Kevin T. Feigelis , Blue Sheffer , Daniel L. K. Yamins

Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task. This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Dhawal Gupta , Yash Chandak , Scott M. Jordan , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

Reinforcement learning (RL) relies heavily on exploration to learn from its environment and maximize observed rewards. Therefore, it is essential to design a reward function that guarantees optimal learning from the received experience.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Ingy ElSayed-Aly , Lu Feng

Reinforcement learning faces significant challenges when applied to tasks characterized by sparse reward structures. Although imitation learning, within the domain of supervised learning, offers faster convergence, it relies heavily on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Zeqiang Zhang , Fabian Wurzberger , Gerrit Schmid , Sebastian Gottwald , Daniel A. Braun

Reward function, as an incentive representation that recognizes humans' agency and rationalizes humans' actions, is particularly appealing for modeling human behavior in human-robot interaction. Inverse Reinforcement Learning is an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Ran Tian , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Liting Sun

Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) actively elicit user preferences to generate adaptive recommendations. Mainstream reinforcement learning-based CRS solutions heavily rely on handcrafted reward functions, which may not be aligned…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Zhendong Chu , Nan Wang , Hongning Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to be often unsuccessful in environments with sparse extrinsic rewards. A possible countermeasure is to endow RL agents with an intrinsic reward function, or 'intrinsic motivation', which rewards the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Francesco Massari , Martin Biehl , Lisa Meeden , Ryota Kanai

Reward models play a critical role in guiding large language models toward outputs that align with human expectations. However, an open challenge remains in effectively utilizing test-time compute to enhance reward model performance. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Jiaxin Guo , Zewen Chi , Li Dong , Qingxiu Dong , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Furu Wei

Growing advancements in reinforcement learning has led to advancements in control theory. Reinforcement learning has effectively solved the inverted pendulum problem and more recently the double inverted pendulum problem. In reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-26 Amartya Mukherjee

Learning goal conditioned control in the real world is a challenging open problem in robotics. Reinforcement learning systems have the potential to learn autonomously via trial-and-error, but in practice the costs of manual reward design,…

For a natural social human-robot interaction, it is essential for a robot to learn the human-like social skills. However, learning such skills is notoriously hard due to the limited availability of direct instructions from people to teach a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-04-17 Ahmed Hussain Qureshi , Yutaka Nakamura , Yuichiro Yoshikawa , Hiroshi Ishiguro

This paper presents a new reward function that can be used for deep reinforcement learning in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) control and navigation problems. The reward function is based on the construction and estimation of the time of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-07-20 Mikhail S. Tovarnov , Nikita V. Bykov

While bigger and deeper neural network architectures continue to advance the state-of-the-art for many computer vision tasks, real-world adoption of these networks is impeded by hardware and speed constraints. Conventional model compression…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-19 Anubhav Ashok , Nicholas Rhinehart , Fares Beainy , Kris M. Kitani

Resource limitations make it hard to provide all students with one of the most effective educational interventions: personalized instruction. Reinforcement learning could be a key tool to reduce the development cost and improve the…

When deploying artificial agents in real-world environments where they interact with humans, it is crucial that their behavior is aligned with the values, social norms or other requirements of that environment. However, many environments…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Mattijs Baert , Pietro Mazzaglia , Sam Leroux , Pieter Simoens

The aim of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world applications is to create systems capable of making autonomous decisions by learning from their environment through trial and error. This paper emphasizes the importance of reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Sinan Ibrahim , Mostafa Mostafa , Ali Jnadi , Hadi Salloum , Pavel Osinenko

Reward shaping has been applied widely to accelerate Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents' training. However, a principled way of designing effective reward shaping functions, especially for complex continuous control problems, remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Mateo Juliani , Mingxuan Li , Elias Bareinboim

Intelligent agents must pursue their goals in complex environments with partial information and often limited computational capacity. Reinforcement learning methods have achieved great success by creating agents that optimize engineered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Alejandro Daniel Noel , Charel van Hoof , Beren Millidge

The ability to discriminate similar visual stimuli is an important index of memory function. This ability is widely thought to be supported by expanding the dimensionality of relevant neural codes, such that neural representations for…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-10-14 Dale Zhou , Sharon Mina Noh , Nora C Harhen , Nidhi V Banavar , C. Brock Kirwan , Michael A Yassa , Aaron M Bornstein