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A central challenge in reinforcement learning is discovering effective policies for tasks where rewards are sparsely distributed. We postulate that in the absence of useful reward signals, an effective exploration strategy should seek out…

Training a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) model with a sparse reward is generally difficult because numerous combinations of interactions among agents induce a certain outcome (i.e., success or failure). Earlier studies have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Heechang Ryu , Hayong Shin , Jinkyoo Park

In continuous control, exploration is often performed through undirected strategies in which parameters of the networks or selected actions are perturbed by random noise. Although the deep setting of undirected exploration has been shown to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Baturay Saglam , Suleyman S. Kozat

The capability to widely sample the state and action spaces is a key ingredient toward building effective reinforcement learning algorithms. The variational optimization principles exposed in this paper emphasize the importance of an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Emmanuel Daucé

A long-standing goal in AI is to develop agents capable of solving diverse tasks across a range of environments, including those never seen during training. Two dominant paradigms address this challenge: (i) reinforcement learning (RL),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Vlad Sobal , Wancong Zhang , Kyunghyun Cho , Randall Balestriero , Tim G. J. Rudner , Yann LeCun

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically struggle in the absence of a dense, well-shaped reward function. Intrinsically motivated exploration methods address this limitation by rewarding agents for visiting novel states or transitions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-18 Yuqing Du , Olivia Watkins , Zihan Wang , Cédric Colas , Trevor Darrell , Pieter Abbeel , Abhishek Gupta , Jacob Andreas

For most reinforcement learning approaches, the learning is performed by maximizing an accumulative reward that is expectedly and manually defined for specific tasks. However, in real world, rewards are emergent phenomena from the complex…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-05-23 Min Xu

Efficient exploration remains a major challenge for reinforcement learning. One reason is that the variability of the returns often depends on the current state and action, and is therefore heteroscedastic. Classical exploration strategies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-26 Nikolay Nikolov , Johannes Kirschner , Felix Berkenkamp , Andreas Krause

Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms such as Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) often require additional exploration strategies, especially if the actor is of deterministic nature. This work evaluates the use of model-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Kevin Sebastian Luck , Mel Vecerik , Simon Stepputtis , Heni Ben Amor , Jonathan Scholz

Sequential decision-making agents struggle with long horizon tasks, since solving them requires multi-step reasoning. Most reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms address this challenge by improved credit assignment, introducing memory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Bogdan Mazoure , Jake Bruce , Doina Precup , Rob Fergus , Ankit Anand

Equipping artificial agents with useful exploration mechanisms remains a challenge to this day. Humans, on the other hand, seem to manage the trade-off between exploration and exploitation effortlessly. In the present article, we put…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Marcel Binz , Eric Schulz

This paper reviews exploration techniques in deep reinforcement learning. Exploration techniques are of primary importance when solving sparse reward problems. In sparse reward problems, the reward is rare, which means that the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Pawel Ladosz , Lilian Weng , Minwoo Kim , Hyondong Oh

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

Autonomous mapping of unknown environments is a critical challenge, particularly in scenarios where time is limited. Multi-agent systems can enhance efficiency through collaboration, but the scalability of motion-planning algorithms remains…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Sriram Rajasekar , Ashwini Ratnoo

The explore{exploit dilemma is one of the central challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Bayesian RL solves the dilemma by providing the agent with information in the form of a prior distribution over environments; however, full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-19 Jonathan Sorg , Satinder Singh , Richard L. Lewis

The central tenet of reinforcement learning (RL) is that agents seek to maximize the sum of cumulative rewards. In contrast, active inference, an emerging framework within cognitive and computational neuroscience, proposes that agents act…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Alexander Tschantz , Beren Millidge , Anil K. Seth , Christopher L. Buckley

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

Combining model-based and model-free deep reinforcement learning has shown great promise for improving sample efficiency on complex control tasks while still retaining high performance. Incorporating imagination is a recent effort in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-11 Muhammad Burhan Hafez , Cornelius Weber , Matthias Kerzel , Stefan Wermter

Effective exploration in reinforcement learning requires not only tracking where an agent has been, but also understanding how the agent perceives and represents the world. To learn powerful representations, an agent should actively explore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Faisal Mohamed , Catherine Ji , Benjamin Eysenbach , Glen Berseth

In the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, the learning is guided through a reward signal. This means that in situations of sparse rewards the agent has to focus on exploration, in order to discover which action, or set of actions leads…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-03 Giuseppe Paolo