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Intrinsic rewards can improve exploration in reinforcement learning, but the exploration process may suffer from instability caused by non-stationary reward shaping and strong dependency on hyperparameters. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Lukas Schäfer , Filippos Christianos , Josiah P. Hanna , Stefano V. Albrecht

Maximum entropy reinforcement learning integrates exploration into policy learning by providing additional intrinsic rewards proportional to the entropy of some distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel approach in which the intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

Exploring in environments with high-dimensional observations is hard. One promising approach for exploration is to use intrinsic rewards, which often boils down to estimating "novelty" of states, transitions, or trajectories with deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Toru Lin , Allan Jabri

Advancements in reinforcement learning have produced a variety of complex and useful intrinsic driving forces; crucially, these drivers operate under a direct conditioning paradigm. This form of conditioning limits our agents' capacity by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Rodney A Sanchez , Ferat Sahin , Alex Ororbia , Jamison Heard

Reinforcement learning is a machine learning approach based on behavioral psychology. It is focused on learning agents that can acquire knowledge and learn to carry out new tasks by interacting with the environment. However, a problem…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Hugo Muñoz , Ernesto Portugal , Angel Ayala , Bruno Fernandes , Francisco Cruz

Exploration has been a crucial part of reinforcement learning, yet several important questions concerning exploration efficiency are still not answered satisfactorily by existing analytical frameworks. These questions include exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-12-06 Liangpeng Zhang , Ke Tang , Xin Yao

Efficient exploration in complex environments remains a major challenge for reinforcement learning. We propose bootstrapped DQN, a simple algorithm that explores in a computationally and statistically efficient manner through use of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-05 Ian Osband , Charles Blundell , Alexander Pritzel , Benjamin Van Roy

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

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…

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

Effective and intelligent exploration has been an unresolved problem for reinforcement learning. Most contemporary reinforcement learning relies on simple heuristic strategies such as $\epsilon$-greedy exploration or adding Gaussian noise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Muhammad Usama , Dong Eui Chang

A default assumption in the design of reinforcement-learning algorithms is that a decision-making agent always explores to learn optimal behavior. In sufficiently complex environments that approach the vastness and scale of the real world,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Dilip Arumugam , Saurabh Kumar , Ramki Gummadi , Benjamin Van Roy

Intrinsic rewards play a central role in handling the exploration-exploitation trade-off when designing sequential decision-making algorithms, in both foundational theory and state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning. The LinUCB…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-13 Jordan T. Ash , Cyril Zhang , Surbhi Goel , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Sham Kakade

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their selection of actions to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Temporal Difference (TD) Learning -- a model-free RL method -- is a leading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

We propose a reinforcement learning agent to solve hard exploration games by learning a range of directed exploratory policies. We construct an episodic memory-based intrinsic reward using k-nearest neighbors over the agent's recent…

Recent work investigated the use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) for the synthesis of heuristic guidance to improve the performance of temporal planners when a domain is fixed and a set of training problems (not plans) is given. The idea is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Irene Brugnara , Alessandro Valentini , Andrea Micheli

In reinforcement learning, an agent interacts sequentially with an environment to maximize a reward, receiving only partial, probabilistic feedback. This creates a fundamental exploration-exploitation trade-off: the agent must explore to…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-27 Josep Lumbreras , Ruo Cheng Huang , Yanglin Hu , Marco Fanizza , Mile Gu

Reinforcement learning has shown great promise in robotics thanks to its ability to develop efficient robotic control procedures through self-training. In particular, reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to solving the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Pierre Aumjaud , David McAuliffe , Francisco Javier Rodríguez Lera , Philip Cardiff

Autonomous artificial agents must be able to learn behaviors in complex environments without humans to design tasks and rewards. Designing these functions for each environment is not feasible, thus, motivating the development of intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Alana Santana , Paula P. Costa , Esther L. Colombini