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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

Maintaining the long-term exploration capability of the agent remains one of the critical challenges in deep reinforcement learning. A representative solution is to leverage reward shaping to provide intrinsic rewards for the agent to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Mingqi Yuan , Mon-on Pun , Dong Wang , Yi Chen , Haojun Li

In this paper we address the challenge of exploration in deep reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation tasks. In sparse goal settings, an agent does not receive any positive feedback until randomly achieving the goal, which becomes…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-23 Nikola Vulin , Sammy Christen , Stefan Stevsic , Otmar Hilliges

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

Exploration is a key problem in reinforcement learning. Recently bonus-based methods have achieved considerable successes in environments where exploration is difficult such as Montezuma's Revenge, which assign additional bonuses (e.g.,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-02 Yan Song , Yingfeng Chen , Yujing Hu , Changjie Fan

Robots must know how to be gentle when they need to interact with fragile objects, or when the robot itself is prone to wear and tear. We propose an approach that enables deep reinforcement learning to train policies that are gentle, both…

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents continually interact with the environment and use the feedback to refine their behavior. To guide policy optimization, reward models are introduced as proxies of the desired objectives, such that when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Rui Yu , Shenghua Wan , Yucen Wang , Chen-Xiao Gao , Le Gan , Zongzhang Zhang , De-Chuan Zhan

Recent developments in multi-agent imitation learning have shown promising results for modeling the behavior of human drivers. However, it is challenging to capture emergent traffic behaviors that are observed in real-world datasets. Such…

Intrinsic motivation is a promising exploration technique for solving reinforcement learning tasks with sparse or absent extrinsic rewards. There exist two technical challenges in implementing intrinsic motivation: 1) how to design a proper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Xiang Zheng , Xingjun Ma , Cong Wang

While offline reinforcement learning provides reliable policies for real-world deployment, its inherent pessimism severely restricts an agent's ability to explore and collect novel data online. Drawing inspiration from safe reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Amirhossein Roknilamouki , Arnob Ghosh , Eylem Ekici , Ness B. Shroff

Reinforcement learning algorithms rely on carefully engineering environment rewards that are extrinsic to the agent. However, annotating each environment with hand-designed, dense rewards is not scalable, motivating the need for developing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-14 Yuri Burda , Harri Edwards , Deepak Pathak , Amos Storkey , Trevor Darrell , Alexei A. Efros

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been proven its efficiency in capturing users' dynamic interests in recent literature. However, training a DRL agent is challenging, because of the sparse environment in recommender systems (RS), DRL…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Xiaocong Chen , Siyu Wang , Lina Yao , Lianyong Qi , Yong Li

Designing a distribution of environments in which RL agents can learn interesting and useful skills is a challenging and poorly understood task, for multi-agent environments the difficulties are only exacerbated. One approach is to train a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-07 Ingmar Kanitscheider , Harri Edwards

Learning effective policies for sparse objectives is a key challenge in Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). A common approach is to design task-related dense rewards to improve task learnability. While such rewards are easily interpreted,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-12 Hassam Sheikh , Shauharda Khadka , Santiago Miret , Somdeb Majumdar

Recent trends in Reinforcement Learning (RL) highlight the need for agents to learn from reward-free interactions and alternative supervision signals, such as unlabeled or incomplete demonstrations, rather than relying solely on explicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Elias Malomgré , Pieter Simoens

Balancing exploration and exploitation is a fundamental part of reinforcement learning, yet most state-of-the-art algorithms use a naive exploration protocol like $\epsilon$-greedy. This contributes to the problem of high sample complexity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Tom Blau , Lionel Ott , Fabio Ramos

To achieve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL), it necessitates efficiently exploring the underlying environment. Under the offline setting, addressing the exploration challenge lies in collecting an offline dataset with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Shuang Qiu , Jieping Ye , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Reinforcement Learning is a highly active research field with promising advancements. In the field of autonomous driving, however, often very simple scenarios are being examined. Common approaches use non-interpretable control commands as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Daniel Bogdoll , Jing Qin , Moritz Nekolla , Ahmed Abouelazm , Tim Joseph , J. Marius Zöllner

Go-Explore achieved breakthrough performance on challenging reinforcement learning (RL) tasks with sparse rewards. The key insight of Go-Explore was that successful exploration requires an agent to first return to an interesting state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-14 Zhao Yang , Thomas M. Moerland , Mike Preuss , Aske Plaat

Exploration is critical for deep reinforcement learning in complex environments with high-dimensional observations and sparse rewards. To address this problem, recent approaches proposed to leverage intrinsic rewards to improve exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-11 Mingqi Yuan , Bo Li , Xin Jin , Wenjun Zeng