English
Related papers

Related papers: SEMI: Self-supervised Exploration via Multisensory…

200 papers

This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-17 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Dale Schuurmans

A key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is environment generalization: a policy trained to solve a task in one environment often fails to solve the same task in a slightly different test environment. A common approach to improve…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-07-30 Wenxuan Zhou , Lerrel Pinto , Abhinav Gupta

Exploration is critical to a reinforcement learning agent's performance in its given environment. Prior exploration methods are often based on using heuristic auxiliary predictions to guide policy behavior, lacking a mathematically-grounded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Lisa Lee , Benjamin Eysenbach , Emilio Parisotto , Eric Xing , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

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

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as multi-step decision-making agents, where effective reward design is essential for guiding learning. Although recent work explores various forms of reward shaping and step-level…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Dengjia Zhang , Xiaoou Liu , Lu Cheng , Yaqing Wang , Kenton Murray , Hua Wei

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Xinran Liang , Katherine Shu , Kimin Lee , Pieter Abbeel

Exploration in sparse reward environments remains one of the key challenges of model-free reinforcement learning. Instead of solely relying on extrinsic rewards provided by the environment, many state-of-the-art methods use intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Roberta Raileanu , Tim Rocktäschel

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

Positive affect has been linked to increased interest, curiosity and satisfaction in human learning. In reinforcement learning, extrinsic rewards are often sparse and difficult to define, intrinsically motivated learning can help address…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Dean Zadok , Daniel McDuff , Ashish Kapoor

Intrinsic motivation enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to explore when rewards are very sparse, where traditional exploration heuristics such as Boltzmann or e-greedy would typically fail. However, intrinsic exploration is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Philippe Morere , Fabio Ramos

In recent years Landmark Complexes have been successfully employed for localization-free and metric-free autonomous exploration using a group of sensing-limited and communication-limited robots in a GPS-denied environment. To ensure rapid…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Xiatao Sun , Yuwei Wu , Subhrajit Bhattacharya , Vijay Kumar

In reinforcement learning, unsupervised skill discovery aims to learn diverse skills without extrinsic rewards. Previous methods discover skills by maximizing the mutual information (MI) between states and skills. However, such an MI…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Rushuai Yang , Chenjia Bai , Hongyi Guo , Siyuan Li , Bin Zhao , Zhen Wang , Peng Liu , Xuelong Li

The performance of existing supervised neuron segmentation methods is highly dependent on the number of accurate annotations, especially when applied to large scale electron microscopy (EM) data. By extracting semantic information from…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-10-09 Yinda Chen , Wei Huang , Shenglong Zhou , Qi Chen , Zhiwei Xiong

In practice, incentive providers (i.e., principals) often cannot observe the reward realizations of incentivized agents, which is in contrast to many principal-agent models that have been previously studied. This information asymmetry…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Ilgin Dogan , Zuo-Jun Max Shen , Anil Aswani

In environments with sparse rewards, finding a good inductive bias for exploration is crucial to the agent's success. However, there are two competing goals: novelty search and systematic exploration. While existing approaches such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Stefan Sylvius Wagner , Peter Arndt , Jan Robine , Stefan Harmeling

Learning in environments with sparse rewards remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning. Artificial curiosity addresses this limitation through intrinsic rewards to guide exploration, however, the precise formulation of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Alexander Nedergaard , Pablo A. Morales

Exploration is a crucial and distinctive aspect of reinforcement learning (RL) that remains a fundamental open problem. Several methods have been proposed to tackle this challenge. Commonly used methods inject random noise directly into the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Sebastian Griesbach , Carlo D'Eramo

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

Exploration in sparse reward reinforcement learning remains an open challenge. Many state-of-the-art methods use intrinsic motivation to complement the sparse extrinsic reward signal, giving the agent more opportunities to receive feedback…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-24 Jingwei Zhang , Niklas Wetzel , Nicolai Dorka , Joschka Boedecker , Wolfram Burgard

State-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically use random sampling (e.g., $\epsilon$-greedy) for exploration, but this method fails on hard exploration tasks like Montezuma's Revenge. To address the challenge of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Eric Chen , Zhang-Wei Hong , Joni Pajarinen , Pulkit Agrawal