Related papers: Boredom-driven curious learning by Homeo-Heterosta…

In open-ended environments, autonomous learning agents must set their own goals and build their own curriculum through an intrinsically motivated exploration. They may consider a large diversity of goals, aiming to discover what is…

Hierarchical abstraction and curiosity-driven exploration are two common paradigms in current reinforcement learning approaches to break down difficult problems into a sequence of simpler ones and to overcome reward sparsity. However, there…

Wide applications of LLM-based agents require strong alignment with human social values. However, current works still exhibit deficiencies in self-cognition and dilemma decision, as well as self-emotions. To remedy this, we propose a novel…

We present a novel method for learning hierarchical abstractions that prioritize competing objectives, leading to improved global expected rewards. Our approach employs a secondary rewarding agent with multiple scalar outputs, each…

In humans, intrinsic motivation is an important mechanism for open-ended cognitive development; in robots, it has been shown to be valuable for exploration. An important aspect of human cognitive development is $\textit{episodic memory}$…

Curiosity has established itself as a powerful exploration strategy in deep reinforcement learning. Notably, leveraging expected future novelty as intrinsic motivation has been shown to efficiently generate exploratory trajectories, as well…

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for those tasks where rewards from environments are sparse. A commonly used approach for exploring such environments is to introduce some "intrinsic"…

Intrinsic rewards have been increasingly used to mitigate the sparse reward problem in single-agent reinforcement learning. These intrinsic rewards encourage the agent to look for novel experiences, guiding the agent to explore the…

This work combines the free energy principle from cognitive neuroscience and the ensuing active inference dynamics with recent advances in variational inference in deep generative models, and evolution strategies to introduce the "deep…

The problem of balancing conflicting needs is fundamental to intelligence. Standard reinforcement learning algorithms maximize a scalar reward, which requires combining different objective-specific rewards into a single number.…

Computer-aided design of molecules has the potential to disrupt the field of drug and material discovery. Machine learning, and deep learning, in particular, have been topics where the field has been developing at a rapid pace.…

In the early stages of human life, babies develop their skills by exploring different scenarios motivated by their inherent satisfaction rather than by extrinsic rewards from the environment. This behavior, referred to as intrinsic…

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…

Inferential decision-making algorithms typically assume that an underlying probabilistic model of decision alternatives and outcomes may be learned a priori or online. Furthermore, when applied to robots in real-world settings they often…

Many engineering and scientific workflows rely on expensive black-box evaluations, requiring sequential decisions that must both improve task performance and reduce uncertainty. Bayesian optimization (BO) and Bayesian experimental design…

The rapid progress in machine learning in recent years has been based on a highly productive connection to gradient-based optimization. Further progress hinges in part on a shift in focus from pattern recognition to decision-making and…

The concept of the value-gradient is introduced and developed in the context of reinforcement learning. It is shown that by learning the value-gradients exploration or stochastic behaviour is no longer needed to find locally optimal…

How do cognitive agents decide what is the relevant information to learn and how goals are selected to gain this knowledge? Cognitive agents need to be motivated to perform any action. We discuss that emotions arise when differences between…

Consider the problem of exploration in sparse-reward or reward-free environments, such as in Montezuma's Revenge. In the curiosity-driven paradigm, the agent is rewarded for how much each realized outcome differs from their predicted…

Exploration is a prerequisite for learning useful behaviors in sparse-reward, long-horizon tasks, particularly within 3D environments. Curiosity-driven reinforcement learning addresses this via intrinsic rewards derived from the mismatch…