Sparse Rewards

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2 papers in the last 28 days · 0.1% of indexed attention

Twelve weeks of publication activity for this topic as it is defined today.

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External Reward ModelsIntrinsic RewardsReward SignalReward FunctionsSingle Reward Model

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Period ending 2026-09-14

1 new paper

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Period ending 2026-09-07

1 new paper

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Sparse Rewards.

45 papers

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  1. Phase-and-First-Arrival VLM Feedback for Sparse-Reward Reinforcement Learning in Surgical Manipulation

    Sep 7, 2026Wanli Liuchen, Fangyuan Wang, Bin Li +4Sparse RewardsRobot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery

  2. Sequential Beats Joint: On the Interplay between On-Policy Distillation and RLVR

    Sep 3, 2026Boyan Li, Bingsen Chen, Chenghao Yang +3Verifiable RewardsOn-Policy Distillation

  3. Exploration-Driven Personalized Federated Reinforcement Learning via Intrinsic Motivation

    Aug 11, 2026Md Rafid Islam, Rafsan Jany, Zahid Hasan +1Sparse RewardsCuriosity-Driven Exploration

  4. SCOUT: Self-Checking and Recovery-Aware Tool-Thought Agents for Ultra-Long Egocentric Video Reasoning

    Aug 8, 2026Keyang Zhong, Kuo Wang, Peng Liu +5Agentic Video GenerationLong-Horizon Agents

  5. SMOPD: Multi-Reward Reinforcement Learning via Specialize-and-Merge Online Policy Distillation

    Aug 4, 2026Wen Wang, Jiahua Bao, Tu Yongsiqi +8Sparse RewardsOn-Policy Distillation

  6. Distill Where You Fail: Recovering Learning Signals of Negative RL-Groups from Adaptive Teacher Guidance

    Aug 1, 2026Zhuowen Han, Jinwei Xiao, Zhengxi Lu +9On-Policy DistillationSparse Rewards

  7. Explore Beyond the Boundary Using Entropic Information

    Jul 31, 2026Bumgeun Park, Donghwan LeeSparse RewardsCuriosity-Driven Exploration

  8. SCOUT: Per-Context Reset Curricula for Sparse-Reward Reinforcement Learning

    Jul 29, 2026Siddharth Aphale, Ayushman SinghSparse RewardsCurriculum Reinforcement Learning

  9. CAST: Game Solvers as Turn-Level Teachers for LLM Agents

    Jul 28, 2026Yu Wang, Yi-Kai Zhang, Wentao Shi +8Verifiable RewardsSparse Rewards

  10. Hierarchical Soft Actor-Critic for Sparse-Reward Long-Horizon Reinforcement Learning

    Jul 26, 2026Zahra Abdalla Elashaal, Afef Hfaiedh, Nahla Khraief +2Hierarchical Reinforcement LearningSparse Rewards

  11. AdaKP: Online Adaptive Knowledge-Point Selection for Reasoning-Oriented Reinforcement Learning

    Jul 23, 2026Zibin Meng, Zhenyu Zhao, Chunqiang RunSafe Reinforcement LearningSparse Rewards

  12. Progress-conditioned Group Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks

    Jul 22, 2026Kaibing Yang, Guangfeng Cai, Shengtian Yang +6Policy OptimizationLong-Horizon Agents

  13. The Mechanism Matters: When Knowledge Graphs Help Reinforcement Learning

    Jul 21, 2026Mohammed Sameer SyedKnowledge GraphsSafe Reinforcement Learning

  14. Foresight Residual RL for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation with Vision-Language-Action Models

    Jul 17, 2026Yuhan Liu, Xinyu Zhang, Litao Liu +1RobotsSparse Rewards

  15. Unveiling Complex Collective Behaviors from Simple Rewards

    Jul 14, 2026Yize Mi, Jianan Li, Liang Li +1Multi-Agent Reinforcement LearningSwarms

  16. RSPO: Reward-Swap Policy Optimization for Multi-Turn LLM Agents

    Jul 6, 2026Qiang Liu, Taian Guo, Ruizhi Qiao +1Sparse Rewards

  17. HPRO: Hierarchical Progressive Reward Optimization via Preference Extraction for Emotional Text-to-Speech

    Jun 26, 2026Sihang Nie, Xiaofen Xing, Rui Xing +5Text-To-SpeechEmotion

  18. Automating Potential-based Reward Shaping with Vision Language Model Guidance

    Jun 25, 2026Henrik Müller, Daniel KudenkoSparse RewardsVision-Language Reasoning

  19. Learning Process Rewards via Success Visitation Matching for Efficient RL

    Jun 22, 2026Raymond Tsao, Andrew Wagenmaker, Sergey LevineSparse RewardsSafe Reinforcement Learning

  20. The Two-Hump Problem: Bridging the Difficulty Gap in Mathematical Reinforcement Learning

    Jun 19, 2026Lucas Fagan, Michele Tarquini, Ali Shehper +6Safe Reinforcement LearningSparse Rewards

  21. ExpRL: Exploratory RL for LLM Mid-Training

    Jun 15, 2026Violet Xiang, Amrith Setlur, Chase Blagden +2LLM Reasoning MethodsSparse Rewards

  22. OmniOPSD: Rationale-Privileged On-Policy Self-Distillation for Affective Computing

    Jun 14, 2026Zebang Cheng, Shuimu Chen, Boxue Yang +7LLM Reasoning MethodsSparse Rewards

  23. PBSD: Privileged Bayesian Self-Distillation for Long-Horizon Credit Assignment

    Jun 8, 2026Yang Tian, Rui Wang, Xumeng Wen +5Sparse RewardsSafe Reinforcement Learning

  24. Uncertainty-Aware LLM-Guided Policy Shaping for Sparse-Reward Reinforcement Learning

    Jun 4, 2026Ujjwal Bhatta, Utsabi Dangol, Sumaly Bajracharya +2Sparse RewardsSafe Reinforcement Learning

  25. InfoMem: Training Long-Context Memory Agents with Answer-Conditioned Information Gain

    Jun 2, 2026Tiancheng Han, Yong Li, Wuzhou Yu +2Agent MemoryMemforest

  26. AirDreamer: Generalist Drone Navigation with World Models

    Jun 2, 2026Zian Liu, Andong Yang, Chunkai Yang +3DroneDynamic Environments

  27. Coherent Off-Policy Improvement of Large Behavior Models with Learned Rewards

    Jun 1, 2026Christian Scherer, Joe Watson, Theo Gruner +3Imitation LearningReinforcement Fine-Tuning

  28. HPO: Hysteretic Policy Optimization for Stable and Efficient Training under Sparse-Reward Regime

    May 28, 2026Mohamed Sana, Nicola Piovesan, Antonio De Domenico +2Sparse RewardsRelative Policy Optimization

  29. The Sample Complexity of Multiclass and Sparse Contextual Bandits

    May 28, 2026Liad Erez, Fan Chen, Alon Cohen +4Sample ComplexitySparse Rewards

  30. ARMS: Automatic Reward Shaping for Sparse-Reward Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

    May 22, 2026Elie Abboud, Oren GalMulti-Agent Reinforcement LearningSparse Rewards

  31. Self-Play Reinforcement Learning under Imperfect Information in Big 2

    May 21, 2026Aalok PatwaSelf-PlayImperfect-Information Games

  32. Beyond GRPO and On-Policy Distillation: An Empirical Sparse-to-Dense Reward Principle for Language-Model Post-Training

    May 12, 2026Yuanda Xu, Hejian Sang, Zhengze Zhou +3Token-Level SupervisionOn-Policy Distillation

  33. Offline Policy Evaluation for Manipulation Policies via Discounted Liveness Formulation

    May 12, 2026Hao Wang, Joshua Bowden, Colton Crosby +1Robot PoliciesFinite Planning Horizon

  34. Learning to Sparsify Stochastic Linear Bandits

    May 11, 2026Zhengmiao Wang, Ming Chi, Zhi-Wei Liu +2Generalized Linear BanditO(T^Β)$ Simultaneous Regret

  35. ACSAC: Adaptive Chunk Size Actor-Critic with Causal Transformer Q-Network

    May 10, 2026Qian Chen, Junqiao Zhao, Hongtu Zhou +4Soft Actor-CriticSparse Rewards

  36. Functional Graphs for Predicting and Explaining Goal Failure in Sparse Goal-Conditioned RL

    May 10, 2026Shalley DashGoal-Conditioned Reinforcement LearningSparse Rewards

  37. Learning CLI Agents with Structured Action Credit under Selective Observation

    May 8, 2026Haoyang Su, Ying WenAgentic Reinforcement LearningCredit Scoring

  38. Matrix-Decoupled Concentration for Autoregressive Sequences: Dimension-Free Guarantees for Sparse Long-Context Rewards

    May 7, 2026Pei-Sen LiAutoregressive Language ModelsAutoregressive Model

  39. FINER-SQL: Boosting Small Language Models for Text-to-SQL

    May 5, 2026Thanh Dat Hoang, Thanh Trung Huynh, Matthias Weidlich +4Text-To-SqlSql

  40. S^3-R1: Learning to Retrieve and Answer Step-by-Step with Synthetic Data

    May 2, 2026Harsh Goel, Akhil Udathu, Susmija Jabbireddy +2Multi-Hop Question Answering BenchmarksSparse Rewards

  41. Sample-efficient Neuro-symbolic Proximal Policy Optimization

    Apr 28, 2026Simone Murari, Celeste Veronese, Daniele MeliProximal Policy OptimizationNeurosymbolic Approach

  42. Zero Shot Coordination for Sparse Reward Tasks with Diverse Reward Shapings

    Apr 28, 2026Keenan Powell, Peihong Yu, Pratap TokekarMulti-Agent Reinforcement LearningSparse Rewards

  43. Reducing Credit Assignment Variance via Counterfactual Reasoning Paths

    Apr 20, 2026Fei Ding, Yongkang Zhang, Youwei Wang +1Sparse RewardsDirect Advantage Estimation

  44. S-GRPO: Unified Post-Training for Large Vision-Language Models

    Apr 17, 2026Yuming Yan, Kai Tang, Sihong Chen +4Unsupervised Domain AdaptationPost-Training

  45. Alleviating Sparse Rewards by Modeling Step-Wise and Long-Term Sampling Effects in Flow-Based GRPO

    Feb 6, 2026Yunze Tong, Mushui Liu, Canyu Zhao +7GrokipediaDenoising Trajectory