English
Related papers

Related papers: Unifying Count-Based Exploration and Intrinsic Mot…

200 papers

An effective approach to exploration in reinforcement learning is to rely on an agent's uncertainty over the optimal policy, which can yield near-optimal exploration strategies in tabular settings. However, in non-tabular settings that…

Unsupervised skill learning objectives (Gregor et al., 2016, Eysenbach et al., 2018) allow agents to learn rich repertoires of behavior in the absence of extrinsic rewards. They work by simultaneously training a policy to produce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-13 DJ Strouse , Kate Baumli , David Warde-Farley , Vlad Mnih , Steven Hansen

In many real-world scenarios, rewards extrinsic to the agent are extremely sparse, or absent altogether. In such cases, curiosity can serve as an intrinsic reward signal to enable the agent to explore its environment and learn skills that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-16 Deepak Pathak , Pulkit Agrawal , Alexei A. Efros , Trevor Darrell

This paper investigates whether learning contingency-awareness and controllable aspects of an environment can lead to better exploration in reinforcement learning. To investigate this question, we consider an instantiation of this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-05 Jongwook Choi , Yijie Guo , Marcin Moczulski , Junhyuk Oh , Neal Wu , Mohammad Norouzi , Honglak Lee

Models of intrinsic motivation present an important means to produce sensible behaviour in the absence of extrinsic rewards. Applications in video games are varied, and range from intrinsically motivated general game-playing agents to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-03-28 Christoph Salge , Christian Guckelsberger , Rodrigo Canaan , Tobias Mahlmann

Our work is a simple extension of the paper "Exploration by Random Network Distillation". More in detail, we show how to efficiently combine Intrinsic Rewards with Experience Replay in order to achieve more efficient and robust exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Francesco Sovrano

Exploration of indoor environments has recently experienced a significant interest, also thanks to the introduction of deep neural agents built in a hierarchical fashion and trained with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) on simulated…

In the last few years, the research activity around reinforcement learning tasks formulated over environments with sparse rewards has been especially notable. Among the numerous approaches proposed to deal with these hard exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Simone Parisi , Davide Tateo , Maximilian Hensel , Carlo D'Eramo , Jan Peters , Joni Pajarinen

Learning in environments with sparse rewards remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning. Artificial curiosity addresses this limitation through intrinsic rewards to guide exploration, however, the precise formulation of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Alexander Nedergaard , Pablo A. Morales

We introduce an exploration bonus for deep reinforcement learning methods that is easy to implement and adds minimal overhead to the computation performed. The bonus is the error of a neural network predicting features of the observations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-31 Yuri Burda , Harrison Edwards , Amos Storkey , Oleg Klimov

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a compelling way to strengthen the multi step reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, prevalent RL paradigms still lean on sparse outcome-based rewards and limited exploration,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Xuan Zhang , Ruixiao Li , Zhijian Zhou , Long Li , Yulei Qin , Ke Li , Xing Sun , Xiaoyu Tan , Chao Qu , Yuan Qi

Positive affect has been linked to increased interest, curiosity and satisfaction in human learning. In reinforcement learning, extrinsic rewards are often sparse and difficult to define, intrinsically motivated learning can help address…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Dean Zadok , Daniel McDuff , Ashish Kapoor

Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and is of prime importance in sparse reward environments. However, many of the state of the art deep reinforcement learning algorithms, that rely on epsilon-greedy, fail on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-15 Navneet Madhu Kumar

In this work we consider partially observable environments with sparse rewards. We present a self-supervised representation learning method for image-based observations, which arranges embeddings respecting temporal distance of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Aleksandr Ermolov , Nicu Sebe

We introduce a new count-based optimistic exploration algorithm for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that is feasible in environments with high-dimensional state-action spaces. The success of RL algorithms in these domains depends crucially on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-06-27 Jarryd Martin , Suraj Narayanan Sasikumar , Tom Everitt , Marcus Hutter

Efficient exploration is necessary to achieve good sample efficiency for reinforcement learning in general. From small, tabular settings such as gridworlds to large, continuous and sparse reward settings such as robotic object manipulation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-20 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Emma Brunskill

Exploration is a key problem in reinforcement learning. Recently bonus-based methods have achieved considerable successes in environments where exploration is difficult such as Montezuma's Revenge, which assign additional bonuses (e.g.,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-02 Yan Song , Yingfeng Chen , Yujing Hu , Changjie Fan

Solving tasks with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in reinforcement learning. In the single-agent setting, this challenge is addressed by introducing intrinsic rewards that motivate agents to explore unseen regions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

In continuous control, exploration is often performed through undirected strategies in which parameters of the networks or selected actions are perturbed by random noise. Although the deep setting of undirected exploration has been shown to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Baturay Saglam , Suleyman S. Kozat