English
Related papers

Related papers: VASE: Variational Assorted Surprise Exploration fo…

200 papers

Reward shaping allows reinforcement learning (RL) agents to accelerate learning by receiving additional reward signals. However, these signals can be difficult to design manually, especially for complex RL tasks. We propose a simple and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-11 Niels Justesen , Sebastian Risi

Solving tasks with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in reinforcement learning. In the single-agent setting, this challenge is addressed by introducing intrinsic rewards that motivate agents to explore unseen regions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

Common approaches to providing feedback in reinforcement learning are the use of hand-crafted rewards or full-trajectory expert demonstrations. Alternatively, one can use examples of completed tasks, but such an approach can be extremely…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Trevor Ablett , Bryan Chan , Jayce Haoran Wang , Jonathan Kelly

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a key approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, prevalent RL approaches like proximal policy optimization and group relative policy optimization suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jingtong Gao , Ling Pan , Yejing Wang , Rui Zhong , Chi Lu , Maolin Wang , Qingpeng Cai , Peng Jiang , Xiangyu Zhao

This paper explores the combination of two intrinsic motivation strategies to improve the efficiency of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in environments with extreme sparse rewards, where traditional learning struggles due to infrequent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 André Quadros , Cassio Silva , Ronnie Alves

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

Intelligent behaviour in the real-world requires the ability to acquire new knowledge from an ongoing sequence of experiences while preserving and reusing past knowledge. We propose a novel algorithm for unsupervised representation learning…

Surprise-based learning allows agents to rapidly adapt to non-stationary stochastic environments characterized by sudden changes. We show that exact Bayesian inference in a hierarchical model gives rise to a surprise-modulated trade-off…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-25 Vasiliki Liakoni , Alireza Modirshanechi , Wulfram Gerstner , Johanni Brea

Reinforcement learning in sparse-reward navigation environments with expensive and limited interactions is challenging and poses a need for effective exploration. Motivated by complex navigation tasks that require real-world training (when…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-13 Yijia Wang , Matthias Poloczek , Daniel R. Jiang

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a machine learning approach that trains agents to maximize cumulative rewards through interactions with environments. The integration of RL with deep learning has recently resulted in impressive achievements…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Hui Bai , Ran Cheng , Yaochu Jin

Visual active search (VAS) has been proposed as a modeling framework in which visual cues are used to guide exploration, with the goal of identifying regions of interest in a large geospatial area. Its potential applications include…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Anindya Sarkar , Nathan Jacobs , Yevgeniy Vorobeychik

Unsupervised reinforcement learning aims at learning a generalist policy in a reward-free manner for fast adaptation to downstream tasks. Most of the existing methods propose to provide an intrinsic reward based on surprise. Maximizing or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Andrew Zhao , Matthieu Gaetan Lin , Yangguang Li , Yong-Jin Liu , Gao Huang

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

We introduce a class of learning problems where the agent is presented with a series of tasks. Intuitively, if there is relation among those tasks, then the information gained during execution of one task has value for the execution of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-09-06 Christos Dimitrakakis

The reinforcement learning (RL) research area is very active, with an important number of new contributions; especially considering the emergent field of deep RL (DRL). However a number of scientific and technical challenges still need to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Arthur Aubret , Laetitia Matignon , Salima Hassas

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), agents aim at maximizing cumulative rewards in a given environment. During the learning process, RL agents face the dilemma of exploitation and exploration: leveraging existing knowledge to acquire rewards or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Chenfan Weng , Zhongguo Li

Exploration is a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Many of the current exploration methods for deep RL use task-agnostic objectives, such as information gain or bonuses based on state visitation. However, many practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-21 Abhishek Gupta , Russell Mendonca , YuXuan Liu , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine

We present a new approach for efficient exploration which leverages a low-dimensional encoding of the environment learned with a combination of model-based and model-free objectives. Our approach uses intrinsic rewards that are based on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-18 Ruo Yu Tao , Vincent François-Lavet , Joelle Pineau

Realistic environments often provide agents with very limited feedback. When the environment is initially unknown, the feedback, in the beginning, can be completely absent, and the agents may first choose to devote all their effort on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Pierre Ménard , Omar Darwiche Domingues , Anders Jonsson , Emilie Kaufmann , Edouard Leurent , Michal Valko