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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

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

While reinforcement learning (RL) methods that learn an internal model of the environment have the potential to be more sample efficient than their model-free counterparts, learning to model raw observations from high dimensional sensors…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Raj Ghugare , Homanga Bharadhwaj , Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

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

To handle the sparsity of the extrinsic rewards in reinforcement learning, researchers have proposed intrinsic reward which enables the agent to learn the skills that might come in handy for pursuing the rewards in the future, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Chao Chen , Zijian Gao , Kele Xu , Sen Yang , Yiying Li , Bo Ding , Dawei Feng , Huaimin Wang

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Viraj Mehta , Ian Char , Joseph Abbate , Rory Conlin , Mark D. Boyer , Stefano Ermon , Jeff Schneider , Willie Neiswanger

When there exists an unlearnable source of randomness (noisy-TV) in the environment, a naively intrinsic reward driven exploring agent gets stuck at that source of randomness and fails at exploration. Intrinsic reward based on uncertainty…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Zhibo Hou , Zhiyu An , Wan Du

Efficient exploration is a long-standing problem in reinforcement learning since extrinsic rewards are usually sparse or missing. A popular solution to this issue is to feed an agent with novelty signals as intrinsic rewards. In this work,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Jianren Wang , Ziwen Zhuang , Hang Zhao

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

Many emerging use cases of data mining and machine learning operate on large datasets with data from heterogeneous sources, specifically with both sparse and dense components. For example, dense deep neural network embedding vectors are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-22 Xiang Wu , Ruiqi Guo , David Simcha , Dave Dopson , Sanjiv Kumar

In this paper, a novel approach is introduced which utilizes a Rapidly-exploring Random Graph to improve sampling-based autonomous exploration of unknown environments with unmanned ground vehicles compared to the current state of the art.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-15 Marco Steinbrink , Philipp Koch , Bernhard Jung , Stefan May

We consider an agent's uncertainty about its environment and the problem of generalizing this uncertainty across observations. Specifically, we focus on the problem of exploration in non-tabular reinforcement learning. Drawing inspiration…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Marc G. Bellemare , Sriram Srinivasan , Georg Ostrovski , Tom Schaul , David Saxton , Remi Munos

Efficient exploration is a long-standing problem in sensorimotor learning. Major advances have been demonstrated in noise-free, non-stochastic domains such as video games and simulation. However, most of these formulations either get stuck…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Deepak Pathak , Dhiraj Gandhi , Abhinav Gupta

Supervised deep learning requires a large amount of training samples with annotations (e.g. label class for classification task, pixel- or voxel-wised label map for segmentation tasks), which are expensive and time-consuming to obtain.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-04-14 Yuanhan Mo , Shuo Wang , Chengliang Dai , Rui Zhou , Zhongzhao Teng , Wenjia Bai , Yike Guo

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) offers an intuitive way to increase the sample efficiency of model-free RL methods by simultaneously training a world model that learns to predict the future. These models constitute the large…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Ashish Sundar , Chunbo Luo , Xiaoyang Wang

Effective and intelligent exploration has been an unresolved problem for reinforcement learning. Most contemporary reinforcement learning relies on simple heuristic strategies such as $\epsilon$-greedy exploration or adding Gaussian noise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Muhammad Usama , Dong Eui Chang

Successfully navigating a complex environment to obtain a desired outcome is a difficult task, that up to recently was believed to be capable only by humans. This perception has been broken down over time, especially with the introduction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Joshua Hare

Exploration is critical for solving real-world decision-making problems such as scientific discovery, where the objective is to generate truly novel designs rather than mimic existing data distributions. In this work, we address the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Riccardo De Santi , Marin Vlastelica , Ya-Ping Hsieh , Zebang Shen , Niao He , Andreas Krause

Rewards are sparse in the real world and most of today's reinforcement learning algorithms struggle with such sparsity. One solution to this problem is to allow the agent to create rewards for itself - thus making rewards dense and more…

Models of physics beyond the Standard Model often contain a large number of parameters. These form a high-dimensional space that is computationally intractable to fully explore. Experimental constraints project onto a subspace of viable…

High Energy Physics - Theory · Physics 2022-01-05 Jacob Hollingsworth , Michael Ratz , Philip Tanedo , Daniel Whiteson