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Dealing with environments with sparse rewards has always been crucial for systems developed to operate in autonomous open-ended learning settings. Intrinsic Motivations could be an effective way to help Deep Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Gianluca Maselli , Vieri Giuliano Santucci

Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Simone Parisi , Alireza Kazemipour , Michael Bowling

The reward hypothesis states that all goals and purposes can be understood as the maximization of a received scalar reward signal. However, in practice, defining such a reward signal is notoriously difficult, as humans are often unable to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Harshit Sikchi , Siddhant Agarwal , Pranaya Jajoo , Samyak Parajuli , Caleb Chuck , Max Rudolph , Peter Stone , Amy Zhang , Scott Niekum

Autonomy is a hallmark of animal intelligence, enabling adaptive and intelligent behavior in complex environments without relying on external reward or task structure. Existing reinforcement learning approaches to exploration in reward-free…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-10-27 Reece Keller , Alyn Kirsch , Felix Pei , Xaq Pitkow , Leo Kozachkov , Aran Nayebi

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

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

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

Reinforcement learners are agents that learn to pick actions that lead to high reward. Ideally, the value of a reinforcement learner's policy approaches optimality--where the optimal informed policy is the one which maximizes reward.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-27 Michael K. Cohen , Elliot Catt , Marcus Hutter

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) studies how to leverage environment statistics to learn useful behaviors without the cost of reward engineering. However, a central challenge in unsupervised RL is to extract behaviors that…

Many scenes in real life can be abstracted to the sparse reward visual scenes, where it is difficult for an agent to tackle the task under the condition of only accepting images and sparse rewards. We propose to decompose this problem into…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Zheng Fang , Biao Zhao , Guizhong Liu

We study the role of intrinsic motivation as an exploration bias for reinforcement learning in sparse-reward synergistic tasks, which are tasks where multiple agents must work together to achieve a goal they could not individually. Our key…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-14 Rohan Chitnis , Shubham Tulsiani , Saurabh Gupta , Abhinav Gupta

Curiosity is one of the main motives in many of the natural creatures with measurable levels of intelligence for exploration and, as a result, more efficient learning. It makes it possible for humans and many animals to explore efficiently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Amir Ramezani Dooraki , Alexandros Iosifidis

Realistic environments often provide agents with very limited feedback. When the environment is initially unknown, the feedback, in the beginning, can be completely absent, and the agents may first choose to devote all their effort on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Pierre Ménard , Omar Darwiche Domingues , Anders Jonsson , Emilie Kaufmann , Edouard Leurent , Michal Valko

Sparse rewards are double-edged training signals in reinforcement learning: easy to design but hard to optimize. Intrinsic motivation guidances have thus been developed toward alleviating the resulting exploration problem. They usually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Mathieu Seurin , Florian Strub , Philippe Preux , Olivier Pietquin

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

We introduce a class of learning problems where the agent is presented with a series of tasks. Intuitively, if there is relation among those tasks, then the information gained during execution of one task has value for the execution of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-09-06 Christos Dimitrakakis

It is a long-standing challenge to enable an intelligent agent to learn in one environment and generalize to an unseen environment without further data collection and finetuning. In this paper, we consider a zero shot generalization problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Huazhe Xu , Boyuan Chen , Yang Gao , Trevor Darrell

In this paper, we study the task of embodied interactive learning for object detection. Given a set of environments (and some labeling budget), our goal is to learn an object detector by having an agent select what data to obtain labels…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-06-17 Devendra Singh Chaplot , Helen Jiang , Saurabh Gupta , Abhinav Gupta

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 under sparse reward is a long-standing challenge of model-free reinforcement learning. The state-of-the-art methods address this challenge by introducing intrinsic rewards to encourage exploration in novel states or uncertain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-05 Daochen Zha , Wenye Ma , Lei Yuan , Xia Hu , Ji Liu