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Related papers: Empowerment-driven Exploration using Mutual Inform…

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This paper provides an empirical evaluation of recently developed exploration algorithms within the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE). We study the use of different reward bonuses that incentives exploration in reinforcement learning. We do…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Adrien Ali Taïga , William Fedus , Marlos C. Machado , Aaron Courville , Marc G. Bellemare

How do you incentivize self-interested agents to $\textit{explore}$ when they prefer to $\textit{exploit}$? We consider complex exploration problems, where each agent faces the same (but unknown) MDP. In contrast with traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Max Simchowitz , Aleksandrs Slivkins

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks where extrinsic rewards from environments are sparse or even totally disregarded. Significant advances based on intrinsic motivation show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Chenjia Bai , Peng Liu , Kaiyu Liu , Lingxiao Wang , Yingnan Zhao , Lei Han

We show that reinforcement learning agents that learn by surprise (surprisal) get stuck at abrupt environmental transition boundaries because these transitions are difficult to learn. We propose a counter-intuitive solution that we call…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-17 Haitao Xu , Brendan McCane , Lech Szymanski , Craig Atkinson

Empowerment, an information-theoretic measure of an agent's potential influence on its environment, has emerged as a powerful intrinsic motivation and exploration framework for reinforcement learning (RL). Besides for unsupervised RL and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Moritz Schneider , Robert Krug , Narunas Vaskevicius , Luigi Palmieri , Michael Volpp , Joschka Boedecker

Autonomous 3D environment exploration is a fundamental task for various applications such as navigation. The goal of exploration is to investigate a new environment and build its occupancy map efficiently. In this paper, we propose a new…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Liu Juncheng , McCane Brendan , Mills Steven

Efficient exploration remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning, especially when an environment contains large state spaces, deceptive local optima, or sparse rewards. To tackle this problem, we present a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Zhang-Wei Hong , Tzu-Yun Shann , Shih-Yang Su , Yi-Hsiang Chang , Chun-Yi Lee

Reinforcement learning has been shown to be highly successful at many challenging tasks. However, success heavily relies on well-shaped rewards. Intrinsically motivated RL attempts to remove this constraint by defining an intrinsic reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Rui Zhao , Yang Gao , Pieter Abbeel , Volker Tresp , Wei Xu

Reinforcement learning has enabled agents to solve challenging tasks in unknown environments. However, manually crafting reward functions can be time consuming, expensive, and error prone to human error. Competing objectives have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-11 Brendon Matusch , Jimmy Ba , Danijar Hafner

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

Efficient exploration in deep cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) still remains challenging in complex coordination problems. In this paper, we introduce a novel Episodic Multi-agent reinforcement learning with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Lulu Zheng , Jiarui Chen , Jianhao Wang , Jiamin He , Yujing Hu , Yingfeng Chen , Changjie Fan , Yang Gao , Chongjie Zhang

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…

We consider a problem of learning the reward and policy from expert examples under unknown dynamics. Our proposed method builds on the framework of generative adversarial networks and introduces the empowerment-regularized maximum-entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Ahmed H. Qureshi , Byron Boots , Michael C. Yip

A reinforcement learning agent tries to maximize its cumulative payoff by interacting in an unknown environment. It is important for the agent to explore suboptimal actions as well as to pick actions with highest known rewards. Yet, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-23 Reazul Hasan Russel

Imitation learning is an effective alternative approach to learn a policy when the reward function is sparse. In this paper, we consider a challenging setting where an agent and an expert use different actions from each other. We assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Konrad Zolna , Negar Rostamzadeh , Yoshua Bengio , Sungjin Ahn , Pedro O. Pinheiro

As language model (LM) agents become increasingly capable and adopted in real-world applications, there is a growing need for scalable evaluation frameworks beyond costly, manually designed benchmarks. We propose information-theoretic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Jinyeop Song , Jeff Gore , Max Kleiman-Weiner

We introduce a methodology for efficiently computing a lower bound to empowerment, allowing it to be used as an unsupervised cost function for policy learning in real-time control. Empowerment, being the channel capacity between actions and…

Exploration is critical for good results in deep reinforcement learning and has attracted much attention. However, existing multi-agent deep reinforcement learning algorithms still use mostly noise-based techniques. Very recently,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Iou-Jen Liu , Unnat Jain , Raymond A. Yeh , Alexander G. Schwing

This paper develops generalizations of empowerment to continuous states. Empowerment is a recently introduced information-theoretic quantity motivated by hypotheses about the efficiency of the sensorimotor loop in biological organisms, but…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-02-01 Tobias Jung , Daniel Polani , Peter Stone

How to efficiently explore in reinforcement learning is an open problem. Many exploration algorithms employ the epistemic uncertainty of their own value predictions -- for instance to compute an exploration bonus or upper confidence bound.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Simon Schmitt , John Shawe-Taylor , Hado van Hasselt