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Related papers: Generative Exploration and Exploitation

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Deep learning has achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning (RL) problems when dense reward function is provided. However, in sparse reward environment it still often suffers from the need to carefully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Hao Liu , Alexander Trott , Richard Socher , Caiming Xiong

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

Reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when the reward signal is very sparse. In these cases, naive random exploration methods essentially rely on a random walk to stumble onto a rewarding state. Recent works utilize intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-14 Hyoungseok Kim , Jaekyeom Kim , Yeonwoo Jeong , Sergey Levine , Hyun Oh Song

To overcome the sparse reward challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) for agents based on large language models (LLMs), we propose Mutual Information Self-Evaluation (MISE), an RL paradigm that utilizes hindsight generative self-evaluation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Jiashu Yao , Heyan Huang , Zeming Liu , Yuhang Guo

Standard model-free reinforcement learning algorithms optimize a policy that generates the action to be taken in the current time step in order to maximize expected future return. While flexible, it faces difficulties arising from the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-07 Haichao Zhang , Wei Xu , Haonan Yu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated notable success in post-training large language models (LLMs) as agents for tasks such as computer use, tool calling, and coding. However, exploration remains a central challenge in RL for LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Andrew Szot , Michael Kirchhof , Omar Attia , Alexander Toshev

Learning to solve tasks from a sparse reward signal is a major challenge for standard reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. However, in the real world, agents rarely need to solve sparse reward tasks entirely from scratch. More often, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-22 Qiyang Li , Jason Zhang , Dibya Ghosh , Amy Zhang , Sergey Levine

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

We propose a new method for event extraction (EE) task based on an imitation learning framework, specifically, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) via generative adversarial network (GAN). The GAN estimates proper rewards according to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-04-24 Tongtao Zhang , Heng Ji

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

Ensuring sufficient exploration is a central challenge when training meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) agents to solve novel environments. Conventional solutions to the exploration-exploitation dilemma inject explicit incentives such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Micah Rentschler , Jesse Roberts

Sequence generation with reinforcement learning (RL) has received significant attention recently. However, a challenge with such methods is the sparse-reward problem in the RL training process, in which a scalar guiding signal is often only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-11-05 Ruiyi Zhang , Changyou Chen , Zhe Gan , Wenlin Wang , Liqun Chen , Dinghan Shen , Guoyin Wang , Lawrence Carin

Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has been used as a tool for finding failures in autonomous systems. During execution, the RL agents often rely on some domain-specific heuristic reward to guide them towards finding failures, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Mark Koren , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

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

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

Exploration is fundamental to reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how effectively an agent discovers and exploits the underlying structure of its environment to achieve optimal performance. Existing exploration methods generally…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Likun Wang , Xiangteng Zhang , Yinuo Wang , Guojian Zhan , Wenxuan Wang , Haoyu Gao , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Philippe Morere , Gilad Francis , Tom Blau , Fabio Ramos

Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique to train an agent to perform a task. However, an agent that is trained using reinforcement learning is only capable of achieving the single task that is specified via its reward function. Such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-24 Carlos Florensa , David Held , Xinyang Geng , Pieter Abbeel

Learning with sparse rewards remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), especially when the aim is to train a policy capable of achieving multiple different goals. To date, the most successful approaches for dealing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Henry Charlesworth , Giovanni Montana

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