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Exploration in complex domains is a key challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks with very sparse rewards. Recent successes in deep reinforcement learning have been achieved mostly using simple heuristic exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-07 Joshua Achiam , Shankar Sastry

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

Hindsight experience replay (HER) is a goal relabelling technique typically used with off-policy deep reinforcement learning algorithms to solve goal-oriented tasks; it is well suited to robotic manipulation tasks that deliver only sparse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Tianhong Dai , Hengyan Liu , Kai Arulkumaran , Guangyu Ren , Anil Anthony Bharath

Mastering robotic manipulation skills through reinforcement learning (RL) typically requires the design of shaped reward functions. Recent developments in this area have demonstrated that using sparse rewards, i.e. rewarding the agent only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-12 Ozsel Kilinc , Giovanni Montana

Hindsight experience replay (HER) is well-known to accelerate goal-based reinforcement learning (RL). While HER is generally applied to off-policy RL algorithms, we previously showed that HER can also accelerate on-policy algorithms, such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Douglas C. Crowder , Matthew L. Trappett , Darrien M. McKenzie , Frances S. Chance

Dealing with sparse rewards is a longstanding challenge in reinforcement learning. The recent use of hindsight methods have achieved success on a variety of sparse-reward tasks, but they fail on complex tasks such as stacking multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 John B. Lanier , Stephen McAleer , Pierre Baldi

Model free reinforcement learning suffers from the high sampling complexity inherent to robotic manipulation or locomotion tasks. Most successful approaches typically use random sampling strategies which leads to slow policy convergence. In…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-08-13 Miroslav Bogdanovic , Ludovic Righetti

Although Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been popular in many disciplines including robotics, state-of-the-art DRL algorithms still struggle to learn long-horizon, multi-step and sparse reward tasks, such as stacking several blocks…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-10 Xintong Yang , Ze Ji , Jing Wu , Yu-kun Lai

This paper investigates whether learning contingency-awareness and controllable aspects of an environment can lead to better exploration in reinforcement learning. To investigate this question, we consider an instantiation of this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-05 Jongwook Choi , Yijie Guo , Marcin Moczulski , Junhyuk Oh , Neal Wu , Mohammad Norouzi , Honglak Lee

Natural language instruction following is paramount to enable collaboration between artificial agents and human beings. Natural language-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) agents have shown how natural languages' properties, such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Kevin Denamganaï , Daniel Hernandez , Ozan Vardal , Sondess Missaoui , James Alfred Walker

Exploration algorithms for reinforcement learning typically replace or augment the reward function with an additional ``intrinsic'' reward that trains the agent to seek previously unseen states of the environment. Here, we consider an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Kevin McKee , Eric Alt , Andrew Grebenisan , Mick van Gelderen , Gary Miguel

Multi-Agent Experience Replay (MER) is a key component of off-policy reinforcement learning~(RL) algorithms. By remembering and reusing experiences from the past, experience replay significantly improves the stability of RL algorithms and…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Kailash Gogineni , Yongsheng Mei , Peng Wei , Tian Lan , Guru Venkataramani

Exploration is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), and its effectiveness is a deciding factor in the performance of RL algorithms, especially when facing sparse extrinsic rewards. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Shanchuan Wan , Yujin Tang , Yingtao Tian , Tomoyuki Kaneko

Robotic manipulation stands as a largely unsolved problem despite significant advances in robotics and machine learning in recent years. One of the key challenges in manipulation is the exploration of the dynamics of the environment when…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Tim Schneider , Boris Belousov , Georgia Chalvatzaki , Diego Romeres , Devesh K. Jha , Jan Peters

Transfer of recent advances in deep reinforcement learning to real-world applications is hindered by high data demands and thus low efficiency and scalability. Through independent improvements of components such as replay buffers or more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 André Eberhard , Houssam Metni , Georg Fahland , Alexander Stroh , Pascal Friederich

We introduce Random Latent Exploration (RLE), a simple yet effective exploration strategy in reinforcement learning (RL). On average, RLE outperforms noise-based methods, which perturb the agent's actions, and bonus-based exploration, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Srinath Mahankali , Zhang-Wei Hong , Ayush Sekhari , Alexander Rakhlin , Pulkit Agrawal

Online recommendation requires handling rapidly changing user preferences. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is gaining interest as an effective means of capturing users' dynamic interest during interactions with recommender systems.…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Xiaocong Chen , Lina Yao , Xianzhi Wang , Julian McAuley

Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) is a multi-goal reinforcement learning algorithm for sparse reward functions. The algorithm treats every failure as a success for an alternative (virtual) goal that has been achieved in the episode. Virtual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Binyamin Manela , Armin Biess

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) studies how to leverage environment statistics to learn useful behaviors without the cost of reward engineering. However, a central challenge in unsupervised RL is to extract behaviors that…

On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated great potential in robotic control, where effective exploration is crucial for efficient and high-quality policy learning. However, how to encourage the agent to explore the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Leixin Chang , Xinchen Yao , Ben Liu , Liangjing Yang , Hua Chen