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Related papers: Intrinsic Reward Policy Optimization for Sparse-Re…

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In the early stages of human life, babies develop their skills by exploring different scenarios motivated by their inherent satisfaction rather than by extrinsic rewards from the environment. This behavior, referred to as intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-25 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

Episodic rewards present a significant challenge in reinforcement learning. While intrinsic reward methods have demonstrated effectiveness in single-agent rein-forcement learning scenarios, their application to multi-agent reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Kesheng Chen , Wenjian Luo , Bang Zhang , Zeping Yin , Zipeng Ye

This paper investigates the use of intrinsic reward to guide exploration in multi-agent reinforcement learning. We discuss the challenges in applying intrinsic reward to multiple collaborative agents and demonstrate how unreliable reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-06-06 Wendelin Böhmer , Tabish Rashid , Shimon Whiteson

Under sparse extrinsic reward settings, reinforcement learning has remained challenging, despite surging interests in this field. Previous attempts suggest that intrinsic reward can alleviate the issue caused by sparsity. In this article,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Zijian Gao , Kele Xu , Yuanzhao Zhai , Dawei Feng , Bo Ding , XinJun Mao , Huaimin Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a key approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, prevalent RL approaches like proximal policy optimization and group relative policy optimization suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jingtong Gao , Ling Pan , Yejing Wang , Rui Zhong , Chi Lu , Maolin Wang , Qingpeng Cai , Peng Jiang , Xiangyu Zhao

Reinforcement learning algorithms rely on carefully engineering environment rewards that are extrinsic to the agent. However, annotating each environment with hand-designed, dense rewards is not scalable, motivating the need for developing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-14 Yuri Burda , Harri Edwards , Deepak Pathak , Amos Storkey , Trevor Darrell , Alexei A. Efros

Optimizing policies based on human preferences is key to aligning language models with human intent. This work focuses on reward modeling, a core component in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), and offline preference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Soichiro Nishimori , Yu-Jie Zhang , Thanawat Lodkaew , Masashi Sugiyama

A reinforcement learning agent that needs to pursue different goals across episodes requires a goal-conditional policy. In addition to their potential to generalize desirable behavior to unseen goals, such policies may also enable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-21 Paulo Rauber , Avinash Ummadisingu , Filipe Mutz , Juergen Schmidhuber

Large language models (LLMs) have recently advanced in reasoning when optimized with reinforcement learning (RL) under verifiable rewards. Existing methods primarily rely on outcome-based supervision to strengthen internal LLM reasoning,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Siyao Song , Cong Ma , Zhihao Cheng , Shiye Lei , Minghao Li , Ying Zeng , Huaixiao Tou , Kai Jia

Exploration algorithms for reinforcement learning typically replace or augment the reward function with an additional ``intrinsic'' reward that trains the agent to seek previously unseen states of the environment. Here, we consider an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Kevin McKee , Eric Alt , Andrew Grebenisan , Mick van Gelderen , Gary Miguel

This paper introduces two novel modifications to the Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO) algorithm [1], approached from a mixed-policy perspective. Standard policy gradient methods can suffer from instability and sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Hongze Tan , Yuchen Li

Large language model (LLM) agents learn by interacting with environments, but long-horizon training remains fundamentally bottlenecked by sparse and delayed rewards. Existing methods typically address this challenge through post-hoc credit…

Constrained reinforcement learning has achieved promising progress in safety-critical fields where both rewards and constraints are considered. However, constrained reinforcement learning methods face challenges in striking the right…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Jianmina Ma , Jingtian Ji , Yue Gao

Deep Reinforcement Learning has been shown to be very successful in complex games, e.g. Atari or Go. These games have clearly defined rules, and hence allow simulation. In many practical applications, however, interactions with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-12 Andreas Merentitis , Kashif Rasul , Roland Vollgraf , Abdul-Saboor Sheikh , Urs Bergmann

Large language models frequently exhibit suboptimal performance on low resource languages, primarily due to inefficient subword segmentation and systemic training data imbalances. In this paper, we propose Variable Entropy Policy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Chonghan Liu , Yimin Du , Qi An , Xin He , Cunqi Zhai , Fei Tan , Weijia Lin , Xiaochun Gong , Yongchao Deng , Shousheng Jia , Xiangzheng Zhang

We revisit Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) in both on-policy and off-policy optimization regimes. Our motivation comes from recent work on off-policy Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), which improves training stability, sampling…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective approach for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). The Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) family has demonstrated strong…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Chenxi Liu , Junjie Liang , Yuqi Jia , Bochuan Cao , Yang Bai , Heng Huang , Xun Chen

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Xinran Liang , Katherine Shu , Kimin Lee , Pieter Abbeel

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) is one of the most popular deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of challenging tasks. However, as a model-free RL method, the success of PPO…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-11 Yuhui Wang , Hao He , Xiaoyang Tan , Yaozhong Gan

We introduce Self-supervised Online Reward Shaping (SORS), which aims to improve the sample efficiency of any RL algorithm in sparse-reward environments by automatically densifying rewards. The proposed framework alternates between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Farzan Memarian , Wonjoon Goo , Rudolf Lioutikov , Scott Niekum , Ufuk Topcu