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Related papers: Some Considerations on Learning to Explore via Met…

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Open-endedness stands to benefit from the ability to generate an infinite variety of diverse, challenging environments. One particularly interesting type of challenge is meta-learning ("learning-to-learn"), a hallmark of intelligent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Thomas Miconi

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) agents never intelligently explore like a human (i.e. taking into account complex domain priors and adapting quickly based on previous exploration). Across episodes, RL agents struggle to perform even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Ben Norman , Jeff Clune

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) aims to quickly solve new tasks by leveraging knowledge from prior tasks. However, previous studies often assume a single mode homogeneous task distribution, ignoring possible structured heterogeneity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Zhendong Chu , Hongning Wang

Exploration is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Many of the current exploration methods for deep RL use task-agnostic objectives, such as information gain or bonuses based on state visitation. However, many practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-21 Abhishek Gupta , Russell Mendonca , YuXuan Liu , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

While deep reinforcement learning (RL) has fueled multiple high-profile successes in machine learning, it is held back from more widespread adoption by its often poor data efficiency and the limited generality of the policies it produces. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Jacob Beck , Risto Vuorio , Evan Zheran Liu , Zheng Xiong , Luisa Zintgraf , Chelsea Finn , Shimon Whiteson

Exploration strategy design is one of the challenging problems in reinforcement learning~(RL), especially when the environment contains a large state space or sparse rewards. During exploration, the agent tries to discover novel areas or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-07 Xiao Ma , Shen-Yi Zhao , Wu-Jun Li

Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) is a versatile meta-learning framework applicable to both supervised learning and reinforcement learning (RL). However, applying MAML to meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) presents notable challenges.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Yang Zhang , Huiwen Yan , Mushuang Liu

Advancements in reinforcement learning (RL) have been remarkable in recent years. However, the limitations of traditional training methods have become increasingly evident, particularly in meta-RL settings where agents face new, unseen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Ramnath Kumar , Tristan Deleu , Yoshua Bengio

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

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

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

Intelligent agents should have the ability to leverage knowledge from previously learned tasks in order to learn new ones quickly and efficiently. Meta-learning approaches have emerged as a popular solution to achieve this. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Zhao Mandi , Pieter Abbeel , Stephen James

To rapidly learn a new task, it is often essential for agents to explore efficiently -- especially when performance matters from the first timestep. One way to learn such behaviour is via meta-learning. Many existing methods however rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-11 Luisa Zintgraf , Leo Feng , Cong Lu , Maximilian Igl , Kristian Hartikainen , Katja Hofmann , Shimon Whiteson

Although deep reinforcement learning has recently been very successful at learning complex behaviors, it requires a tremendous amount of data to learn a task. One of the fundamental reasons causing this limitation lies in the nature of the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-19 Zhenshan Bing , Alexander Koch , Xiangtong Yao , Kai Huang , Alois Knoll

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to balance exploiting the current best strategy with exploring new options that could lead to higher rewards. Most common RL algorithms use undirected exploration, i.e., select random sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Bhavya Sukhija , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause , Pieter Abbeel , Carmelo Sferrazza

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a branch of machine learning which is employed to solve various sequential decision making problems without proper supervision. Due to the recent advancement of deep learning, the newly proposed Deep-RL…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-04-17 Dhruv Ramani

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

Despite groundbreaking progress in reinforcement learning for robotics, gameplay, and other complex domains, major challenges remain in applying reinforcement learning to the evolving, open-world problems often found in critical application…

Model free reinforcement learning suffers from the high sampling complexity inherent to robotic manipulation or locomotion tasks. Most successful approaches typically use random sampling strategies which leads to slow policy convergence. In…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-08-13 Miroslav Bogdanovic , Ludovic Righetti

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Evan Zheran Liu , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Tianlin Shi , Percy Liang