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

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We propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning method, HIDIO, that can learn task-agnostic options in a self-supervised manner while jointly learning to utilize them to solve sparse-reward tasks. Unlike current hierarchical RL approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-10 Jesse Zhang , Haonan Yu , Wei Xu

In recent years Landmark Complexes have been successfully employed for localization-free and metric-free autonomous exploration using a group of sensing-limited and communication-limited robots in a GPS-denied environment. To ensure rapid…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Xiatao Sun , Yuwei Wu , Subhrajit Bhattacharya , Vijay Kumar

All reinforcement learning algorithms must handle the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Many state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning methods use noise in the action selection, such as Gaussian noise in policy gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-05 Trevor Barron , Oliver Obst , Heni Ben Amor

In the realm of multi-agent reinforcement learning, intrinsic motivations have emerged as a pivotal tool for exploration. While the computation of many intrinsic rewards relies on estimating variational posteriors using neural network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Chenghao Li , Tonghan Wang , Chongjie Zhang , Qianchuan Zhao

Training LLM agents in multi-turn environments with sparse rewards, where completing a single task requires 30+ turns of interaction within an episode, presents a fundamental challenge for reinforcement learning. We identify a critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Wujiang Xu , Wentian Zhao , Zhenting Wang , Yu-Jhe Li , Can Jin , Mingyu Jin , Kai Mei , Kun Wan , Dimitris N. Metaxas

Recently there has been a proliferation of intrinsic motivation (IM) reward-shaping methods to learn in complex and sparse-reward environments. These methods can often inadvertently change the set of optimal policies in an environment,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Grant C. Forbes , Leonardo Villalobos-Arias , Jianxun Wang , Arnav Jhala , David L. Roberts

To achieve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL), it necessitates efficiently exploring the underlying environment. Under the offline setting, addressing the exploration challenge lies in collecting an offline dataset with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Shuang Qiu , Jieping Ye , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), a popular on-policy deep reinforcement learning method, employs a stochastic policy for exploration. In this paper, we propose a colored noise-based stochastic policy variant of PPO. Previous research…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Jakob Hollenstein , Georg Martius , Justus Piater

Intrinsic reward shaping has emerged as a prevalent approach to solving hard-exploration and sparse-rewards environments in reinforcement learning (RL). While single intrinsic rewards, such as curiosity-driven or novelty-based methods, have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Mingqi Yuan , Bo Li , Xin Jin , Wenjun Zeng

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

Ensuring safety is important for the practical deployment of reinforcement learning (RL). Various challenges must be addressed, such as handling stochasticity in the environments, providing rigorous guarantees of persistent state-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Milan Ganai , Zheng Gong , Chenning Yu , Sylvia Herbert , Sicun Gao

Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Simone Parisi , Alireza Kazemipour , Michael Bowling

Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning have been hindered by a persistent challenge: exploration collapse. The semantic homogeneity of random rollouts often traps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Huilin Deng , Hongchen Luo , Yue Zhu , Long Li , Zhuoyue Chen , Xinghao Zhao , Ming Li , Jihai Zhang , Mengchang Wang , Yang Cao , Yu Kang

We study the problem of online multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in environments with sparse rewards, where reward feedback is not provided at each interaction but only revealed at the end of a trajectory. This setting, though…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 The Viet Bui , Tien Mai , Hong Thanh Nguyen

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

We study reinforcement learning in hybrid discrete-continuous action spaces, such as settings where the discrete component selects a regime (or index) and the continuous component optimizes within it -- a structure common in robotics,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Matias Alvo , Daniel Russo , Yash Kanoria

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

Multi-objective Markov decision processes are sequential decision-making problems that involve multiple conflicting reward functions that cannot be optimized simultaneously without a compromise. This type of problems cannot be solved by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Sherif Abdelfattah , Kathryn Merrick , Jiankun Hu

Reward machines are an established tool for dealing with reinforcement learning problems in which rewards are sparse and depend on complex sequences of actions. However, existing algorithms for learning reward machines assume an overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jan Corazza , Ivan Gavran , Daniel Neider

We propose and study a general framework for regularized Markov decision processes (MDPs) where the goal is to find an optimal policy that maximizes the expected discounted total reward plus a policy regularization term. The extant…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-22 Xiang Li , Wenhao Yang , Zhihua Zhang