Robotics paper index

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

2026-07-26 · arXiv: 2607.23726

One-line summary

A robotics research paper on Hierarchical Soft Actor-Critic for Sparse-Reward Long-Horizon Reinforcement Learning.

Engineering notes

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Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充:本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Exploration in sparse-reward long-horizon tasks poses significant challenges for reinforcement learning. To address these challenges, we propose a two-level Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) framework. The first level handles high-level strategic planning, while the low-level uses the continuous-control Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm, and they utilize entropy-regularized policy optimization. The proposed framework was trained and evaluated using the Search-and-Rescue-2 (SAR-2) dataset. HRL-SAC effectively addresses sparse-reward long-horizon search problems characterized by delayed rewards and continuous control, and its outperforming the flat SAC baseline reinforcement learning in terms of success rates, coverage efficiency, and convergence. These findings indicate that hierarchical entropy-regularized policies are a promising solution to tackle long-horizon sparse-reward reinforcement learning tasks.

5.0Engineering value
7.0Research novelty
4.0Business relevance

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