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Navigating and understanding complex and unknown environments autonomously demands more than just basic perception and movement from embodied agents. Truly effective exploration requires agents to possess higher-level cognitive abilities,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Abdel Hakim Drid , Vincenzo Suriani , Daniele Nardi , Abderrezzak Debilou

In meta reinforcement learning (meta RL), an agent learns from a set of training tasks how to quickly solve a new task, drawn from the same task distribution. The optimal meta RL policy, a.k.a. the Bayes-optimal behavior, is well defined,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-01 Zohar Rimon , Aviv Tamar , Gilad Adler

Intelligent agents rely heavily on prior experience when learning a new task, yet most modern reinforcement learning (RL) approaches learn every task from scratch. One approach for leveraging prior knowledge is to transfer skills learned on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Karl Pertsch , Youngwoon Lee , Joseph J. Lim

In autonomous robot exploration tasks, a mobile robot needs to actively explore and map an unknown environment as fast as possible. Since the environment is being revealed during exploration, the robot needs to frequently re-plan its path…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Yuhong Cao , Tianxiang Hou , Yizhuo Wang , Xian Yi , Guillaume Sartoretti

Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Max Simchowitz , Tiancheng Yu

Exploration is essential for reinforcement learning (RL). To face the challenges of exploration, we consider a reward-free RL framework that completely separates exploration from exploitation and brings new challenges for exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Chuheng Zhang , Yuanying Cai , Longbo Huang , Jian Li

Efficient exploration is one of the main challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Most existing sample-efficient algorithms assume the existence of a single reward function during exploration. In many practical scenarios, however, there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Xuezhou Zhang , Yuzhe ma , Adish Singla

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) faces significant challenges in addressing the hard-exploration problems in tasks with sparse or deceptive rewards and large state spaces. These challenges severely limit the practical application of DRL.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-03 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Ning Guo , Zhiming Zheng

Meta-learning is a line of research that develops the ability to leverage past experiences to efficiently solve new learning problems. Meta-Reinforcement Learning (meta-RL) methods demonstrate a capability to learn behaviors that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-25 Brieuc Pinon , Jean-Charles Delvenne , Raphaël Jungers

Humans integrate multiple sensory modalities (e.g. visual and audio) to build a causal understanding of the physical world. In this work, we propose a novel type of intrinsic motivation for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that encourages the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-07-28 Chuang Gan , Xiaoyu Chen , Phillip Isola , Antonio Torralba , Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Exploration is an extremely challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially in high dimensional state and action spaces and when only sparse rewards are available. Effective representations can indicate which components of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Giulia Vezzani , Abhishek Gupta , Lorenzo Natale , Pieter Abbeel

Exploration remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in environments with sparse or adversarial reward structures. In this work, we study how the architecture of deep neural policies implicitly shapes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Jacob Adamczyk

To increase autonomy in reinforcement learning, agents need to learn useful behaviours without reliance on manually designed reward functions. To that end, skill discovery methods have been used to learn the intrinsic options available to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-08-05 Even Klemsdal , Sverre Herland , Abdulmajid Murad

One of the remaining challenges in reinforcement learning is to develop agents that can generalise to novel scenarios they might encounter once deployed. This challenge is often framed in a multi-task setting where agents train on a fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Max Weltevrede , Felix Kaubek , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Wendelin Böhmer

Reinforcement learning (RL) often struggles to accomplish a sparse-reward long-horizon task in a complex environment. Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) has been employed to tackle this difficult problem via a curriculum of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Lisheng Wu , Ke Chen

Balancing exploration and exploitation is a fundamental part of reinforcement learning, yet most state-of-the-art algorithms use a naive exploration protocol like $\epsilon$-greedy. This contributes to the problem of high sample complexity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Tom Blau , Lionel Ott , Fabio Ramos

All reinforcement learning algorithms must handle the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Many state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning methods use noise in the action selection, such as Gaussian noise in policy gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-05 Trevor Barron , Oliver Obst , Heni Ben Amor

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms often struggle to find strategies close to Pareto optimal Nash Equilibrium, owing largely to the lack of efficient exploration. The problem is exacerbated in sparse-reward settings,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Zhicheng Zhang , Yancheng Liang , Yi Wu , Fei Fang

In sequential decision-making (SDM) tasks, methods like reinforcement learning (RL) and heuristic search have made notable advances in specific cases. However, they often require extensive exploration and face challenges in generalizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Xue Yan , Yan Song , Xidong Feng , Mengyue Yang , Haifeng Zhang , Haitham Bou Ammar , Jun Wang

Existing approaches for improving generalization in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have mostly focused on representation learning, neglecting RL-specific aspects such as exploration. We hypothesize that the agent's exploration strategy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Yiding Jiang , J. Zico Kolter , Roberta Raileanu