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Related papers: Generative Exploration and Exploitation

200 papers

Building generally capable agents is a grand challenge for deep reinforcement learning (RL). To approach this challenge practically, we outline two key desiderata: 1) to facilitate generalization, exploration should be task agnostic; 2) to…

Opponent modeling methods typically involve two crucial steps: building a belief distribution over opponents' strategies, and exploiting this opponent model by playing a best response. However, existing approaches typically require…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Zun Li , Marc Lanctot , Kevin R. McKee , Luke Marris , Ian Gemp , Daniel Hennes , Paul Muller , Kate Larson , Yoram Bachrach , Michael P. Wellman

Dealing with environments with sparse rewards has always been crucial for systems developed to operate in autonomous open-ended learning settings. Intrinsic Motivations could be an effective way to help Deep Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Gianluca Maselli , Vieri Giuliano Santucci

Efficient exploration in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a challenging problem when receiving only a team reward, especially in environments with sparse rewards. A powerful method to mitigate this issue involves crafting dense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Xuefei Wu , Xiao Yin , Yuanyang Zhu , Chunlin Chen

Reinforcement Learning is a powerful tool to model decision-making processes. However, it relies on an exploration-exploitation trade-off that remains an open challenge for many tasks. In this work, we study neighboring state-based,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Yu-Teng Li , Justin Lin , Jeffery Cheng , Pedro Pachuca

Evolution strategies (ES) are a family of black-box optimization algorithms able to train deep neural networks roughly as well as Q-learning and policy gradient methods on challenging deep reinforcement learning (RL) problems, but are much…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-31 Edoardo Conti , Vashisht Madhavan , Felipe Petroski Such , Joel Lehman , Kenneth O. Stanley , Jeff Clune

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has recently emerged as a practical recipe for aligning large language models with verifiable objectives. However, under sparse terminal rewards, GRPO often stalls because rollouts within a group…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Baohao Liao , Hanze Dong , Xinxing Xu , Christof Monz , Jiang Bian

In multi-goal reinforcement learning (RL) settings, the reward for each goal is sparse, and located in a small neighborhood of the goal. In large dimension, the probability of reaching a reward vanishes and the agent receives little…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-17 Léonard Blier , Yann Ollivier

Back-stepping experience replay (BER) is a reinforcement learning technique that can accelerate learning efficiency in reversible environments. BER trains an agent with generated back-stepping transitions of collected experiences and normal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Guwen Lyu , Masahiro Sato

Bayesian reinforcement learning (RL) offers a principled and elegant approach for sequential decision making under uncertainty. Most notably, Bayesian agents do not face an exploration/exploitation dilemma, a major pathology of frequentist…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Mattie Fellows , Brandon Kaplowitz , Christian Schroeder de Witt , Shimon Whiteson

Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the three basic paradigms of machine learning. It has demonstrated impressive performance in many complex tasks like Go and StarCraft, which is increasingly involved in smart manufacturing and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Mingqi Yuan

Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to expand the capabilities of language models, but it is unclear if current RL techniques promote the discovery of novel behaviors, or simply sharpen those already present in the base model. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Jens Tuyls , Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Jordan T. Ash

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 are interested in how to design reinforcement learning agents that provably reduce the sample complexity for learning new tasks by transferring knowledge from previously-solved ones. The availability of solutions to related problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-03 Andrea Tirinzoni , Riccardo Poiani , Marcello Restelli

Cross-entropy (CE) is the default training loss for supervised classification, but its sample efficiency is limited when labels are scarce. Existing remedies primarily act on the data side, via augmentation, synthesis, or transfer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Qipeng Zhan , Zhuoping Zhou , Li Shen

We study the challenging exploration incentive problem in both bandit and reinforcement learning, where the rewards are scale-free and potentially unbounded, driven by real-world scenarios and differing from existing work. Past works in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Mengfan Xu , Diego Klabjan

The aim of this paper is to study the reward based policy exploration problem in a supervised learning approach and enable robots to form complex movement trajectories in challenging reward settings and search spaces. For this, the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-10 M. Tuluhan Akbulut , Utku Bozdogan , Ahmet Tekden , Emre Ugur

Recent advances in reinforcement learning have inspired increasing interest in learning user modeling adaptively through dynamic interactions, e.g., in reinforcement learning based recommender systems. Reward function is crucial for most of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-06 Xiaocong Chen , Lina Yao , Xianzhi Wang , Aixin Sun , Wenjie Zhang , Quan Z. Sheng

Two key challenges within Reinforcement Learning involve improving (a) agent learning within environments with sparse extrinsic rewards and (b) the explainability of agent actions. We describe a curious subgoal focused agent to address both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Connor van Rossum , Candice Feinberg , Adam Abu Shumays , Kyle Baxter , Benedek Bartha

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