English
Related papers

Related papers: Evaluating Agents without Rewards

200 papers

We introduce an exploration bonus for deep reinforcement learning methods calculated using self-organising feature maps. Our method uses adaptive resonance theory (ART) providing online, unsupervised clustering to quantify the novelty of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-09 Marius Lindegaard , Hjalmar Jacob Vinje , Odin Aleksander Severinsen

This paper investigates the use of intrinsic reward to guide exploration in multi-agent reinforcement learning. We discuss the challenges in applying intrinsic reward to multiple collaborative agents and demonstrate how unreliable reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-06-06 Wendelin Böhmer , Tabish Rashid , Shimon Whiteson

Can artificial agents learn to assist others in achieving their goals without knowing what those goals are? Generic reinforcement learning agents could be trained to behave altruistically towards others by rewarding them for altruistic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Tim Franzmeyer , Mateusz Malinowski , João F. Henriques

In reinforcement learning, an agent learns to reach a set of goals by means of an external reward signal. In the natural world, intelligent organisms learn from internal drives, bypassing the need for external signals, which is beneficial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Rui Zhao , Yang Gao , Pieter Abbeel , Volker Tresp , Wei Xu

An important goal in artificial intelligence is to create agents that can both interact naturally with humans and learn from their feedback. Here we demonstrate how to use reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to improve upon…

This paper explores an intrinsic motivation for mutual awareness, hypothesizing that humans possess a fundamental drive to understand and to be understood even in the absence of extrinsic rewards. Through simulations of the perceptual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-11 Chrisantha Fernando , Dylan Banarse , Simon Osindero

Reinforcement learning algorithms can train agents that solve problems in complex, interesting environments. Normally, the complexity of the trained agent is closely related to the complexity of the environment. This suggests that a highly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-03-16 Trapit Bansal , Jakub Pachocki , Szymon Sidor , Ilya Sutskever , Igor Mordatch

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

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

For sophisticated reinforcement learning (RL) systems to interact usefully with real-world environments, we need to communicate complex goals to these systems. In this work, we explore goals defined in terms of (non-expert) human…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-20 Paul Christiano , Jan Leike , Tom B. Brown , Miljan Martic , Shane Legg , Dario Amodei

Sparse reward environments are known to be challenging for reinforcement learning agents. In such environments, efficient and scalable exploration is crucial. Exploration is a means by which an agent gains information about the environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Jacob Chmura , Hasham Burhani , Xiao Qi Shi

Unsupervised skill learning objectives (Gregor et al., 2016, Eysenbach et al., 2018) allow agents to learn rich repertoires of behavior in the absence of extrinsic rewards. They work by simultaneously training a policy to produce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-13 DJ Strouse , Kate Baumli , David Warde-Farley , Vlad Mnih , Steven Hansen

We study the problem of designing autonomous agents that can learn to cooperate effectively with a potentially suboptimal partner while having no access to the joint reward function. This problem is modeled as a cooperative episodic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Thomas Kleine Buening , Anne-Marie George , Christos Dimitrakakis

In reinforcement learning, we typically refer to unsupervised pre-training when we aim to pre-train a policy without a priori access to the task specification, i.e. rewards, to be later employed for efficient learning of downstream tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Riccardo Zamboni , Mirco Mutti , Marcello Restelli

Intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning aims to address the exploration challenge for sparse-reward tasks. However, the study of exploration methods in transition-dependent multi-agent settings is largely absent from the literature.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-30 Tonghan Wang , Jianhao Wang , Yi Wu , Chongjie Zhang

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

One of the challenges in applying reinforcement learning in a complex real-world environment lies in providing the agent with a sufficiently detailed reward function. Any misalignment between the reward and the desired behavior can result…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Neta Glazer , Aviv Navon , Aviv Shamsian , Ethan Fetaya

For machine agents to successfully interact with humans in real-world settings, they will need to develop an understanding of human mental life. Intuitive psychology, the ability to reason about hidden mental variables that drive observable…

Understanding the emergence of cooperation in systems of computational agents is crucial for the development of effective cooperative AI. Interaction among individuals in real-world settings are often sparse and occur within a broad…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Nicole Orzan , Erman Acar , Davide Grossi , Roxana Rădulescu

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