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

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We propose a reinforcement learning framework for discrete environments in which an agent makes both strategic and tactical decisions. The former manifests itself through the use of value function, while the latter is powered by a tree…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-05 Piotr Miłoś , Łukasz Kuciński , Konrad Czechowski , Piotr Kozakowski , Maciek Klimek

When there exists an unlearnable source of randomness (noisy-TV) in the environment, a naively intrinsic reward driven exploring agent gets stuck at that source of randomness and fails at exploration. Intrinsic reward based on uncertainty…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Zhibo Hou , Zhiyu An , Wan Du

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms have been shown to learn complex tasks using highly general policy classes. However, sparse reward problems remain a significant challenge. Exploration methods based on novelty detection have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-30 Justin Fu , John D. Co-Reyes , Sergey Levine

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Minjae Cho , Huy Trong Tran

The human intrinsic desire to pursue knowledge, also known as curiosity, is considered essential in the process of skill acquisition. With the aid of artificial curiosity, we could equip current techniques for control, such as Reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Pietro Mazzaglia , Ozan Catal , Tim Verbelen , Bart Dhoedt

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

Traditional exploration methods in RL require agents to perform random actions to find rewards. But these approaches struggle on sparse-reward domains like Montezuma's Revenge where the probability that any random action sequence leads to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-11-27 Christopher Stanton , Jeff Clune

In this work, we address the challenge of data-efficient exploration in reinforcement learning by examining existing principled, information-theoretic approaches to intrinsic motivation. Specifically, we focus on a class of exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Alberto Caron , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

Efficient exploration is a long-standing problem in sensorimotor learning. Major advances have been demonstrated in noise-free, non-stochastic domains such as video games and simulation. However, most of these formulations either get stuck…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Deepak Pathak , Dhiraj Gandhi , Abhinav Gupta

What drives exploration? Understanding intrinsic motivation is a long-standing challenge in both cognitive science and artificial intelligence; numerous objectives have been proposed and used to train agents, yet there remains a gap between…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Aly Lidayan , Yuqing Du , Eliza Kosoy , Maria Rufova , Pieter Abbeel , Alison Gopnik

This paper provides an empirical evaluation of recently developed exploration algorithms within the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE). We study the use of different reward bonuses that incentives exploration in reinforcement learning. We do…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Adrien Ali Taïga , William Fedus , Marlos C. Machado , Aaron Courville , Marc G. Bellemare

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is challenging because an agent can rarely obtain non-zero rewards and hence, gradient-based optimization of parameterized policies can be incremental and slow. Recent work demonstrated that using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yijie Guo , Jongwook Choi , Marcin Moczulski , Shengyu Feng , Samy Bengio , Mohammad Norouzi , Honglak Lee

We propose a new method for learning from a single demonstration to solve hard exploration tasks like the Atari game Montezuma's Revenge. Instead of imitating human demonstrations, as proposed in other recent works, our approach is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-11 Tim Salimans , Richard Chen

Intrinsic motivation enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to explore when rewards are very sparse, where traditional exploration heuristics such as Boltzmann or e-greedy would typically fail. However, intrinsic exploration is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Philippe Morere , Fabio Ramos

In order to compute near-optimal policies with policy-gradient algorithms, it is common in practice to include intrinsic exploration terms in the learning objective. Although the effectiveness of these terms is usually justified by an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

Efficient exploration is a long-standing problem in reinforcement learning since extrinsic rewards are usually sparse or missing. A popular solution to this issue is to feed an agent with novelty signals as intrinsic rewards. In this work,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Jianren Wang , Ziwen Zhuang , Hang Zhao

Effective exploration is critical for reinforcement learning agents in environments with sparse rewards or high-dimensional state-action spaces. Recent works based on state-visitation counts, curiosity and entropy-maximization generate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Bang You , Jingming Xie , Youping Chen , Jan Peters , Oleg Arenz

The imbalance of exploration and exploitation has long been a significant challenge in reinforcement learning. In policy optimization, excessive reliance on exploration reduces learning efficiency, while over-dependence on exploitation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Renye Yan , Yaozhong Gan , You Wu , Ling Liang , Junliang Xing , Yimao Cai , Ru Huang

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning, particularly in environments where external rewards are sparse. Here we focus on exploration with intrinsic rewards, where the agent transiently augments the external rewards with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Changmin Yu , Neil Burgess , Maneesh Sahani , Samuel J. Gershman

Exploration is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), and its effectiveness is a deciding factor in the performance of RL algorithms, especially when facing sparse extrinsic rewards. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Shanchuan Wan , Yujin Tang , Yingtao Tian , Tomoyuki Kaneko