English
Related papers

Related papers: Rank the Episodes: A Simple Approach for Explorati…

200 papers

While reinforcement learning (RL) has been successful in natural language processing (NLP) domains such as dialogue generation and text-based games, it typically faces the problem of sparse rewards that leads to slow or no convergence.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Ameet Deshpande , Eve Fleisig

Tasks with large state space and sparse rewards present a longstanding challenge to reinforcement learning. In these tasks, an agent needs to explore the state space efficiently until it finds a reward. To deal with this problem, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-16 Jiaheng Hu , Zizhao Wang , Peter Stone , Roberto Martin-Martin

Much of the current work on reinforcement learning studies episodic settings, where the agent is reset between trials to an initial state distribution, often with well-shaped reward functions. Non-episodic settings, where the agent must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 John D. Co-Reyes , Suvansh Sanjeev , Glen Berseth , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine

Demonstrations are widely used in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for facilitating solving tasks with sparse rewards. However, the tasks in real-world scenarios can often have varied initial conditions from the demonstration, which would…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Ruiqi Zhu , Siyuan Li , Tianhong Dai , Chongjie Zhang , Oya Celiktutan

Exploration and reward specification are fundamental and intertwined challenges for reinforcement learning. Solving sequential decision-making tasks requiring expansive exploration requires either careful design of reward functions or the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Marcel Torne , Max Balsells , Zihan Wang , Samedh Desai , Tao Chen , Pulkit Agrawal , Abhishek Gupta

One of the most critical challenges in deep reinforcement learning is to maintain the long-term exploration capability of the agent. To tackle this problem, it has been recently proposed to provide intrinsic rewards for the agent to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Mingqi Yuan , Man-on Pun , Dong Wang

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is challenging because an agent can rarely obtain non-zero rewards and hence, gradient-based optimization of parameterized policies can be incremental and slow. Recent work demonstrated that using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Yijie Guo , Jongwook Choi , Marcin Moczulski , Shengyu Feng , Samy Bengio , Mohammad Norouzi , Honglak Lee

Reward-free reinforcement learning (RL) considers the setting where the agent does not have access to a reward function during exploration, but must propose a near-optimal policy for an arbitrary reward function revealed only after…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Andrew Wagenmaker , Yifang Chen , Max Simchowitz , Simon S. Du , Kevin Jamieson

Multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) problems often encounter the challenge of sparse rewards. This challenge becomes even more pronounced when coordination among agents is necessary. As performance depends not only on one…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Maxime Toquebiau , Nicolas Bredeche , Faïz Benamar , Jae-Yun Jun

The aim of this paper is to study the reward based policy exploration problem in a supervised learning approach and enable robots to form complex movement trajectories in challenging reward settings and search spaces. For this, the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-10 M. Tuluhan Akbulut , Utku Bozdogan , Ahmet Tekden , Emre Ugur

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

Recent research on structured exploration placed emphasis on identifying novel states in the state space and incentivizing the agent to revisit them through intrinsic reward bonuses. In this study, we question whether the performance boost…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Sneha Aenugu

Advancements in reinforcement learning have produced a variety of complex and useful intrinsic driving forces; crucially, these drivers operate under a direct conditioning paradigm. This form of conditioning limits our agents' capacity by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Rodney A Sanchez , Ferat Sahin , Alex Ororbia , Jamison Heard

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

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

While deep reinforcement learning techniques have led to agents that are successfully able to learn to perform a number of tasks that had been previously unlearnable, these techniques are still susceptible to the longstanding problem of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Nicholas Waytowich , Sean L. Barton , Vernon Lawhern , Garrett Warnell

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

We propose Deep Q-Networks (DQN) with model-based exploration, an algorithm combining both model-free and model-based approaches that explores better and learns environments with sparse rewards more efficiently. DQN is a general-purpose,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-25 Stephen Zhen Gou , Yuyang Liu

We introduce a class of learning problems where the agent is presented with a series of tasks. Intuitively, if there is relation among those tasks, then the information gained during execution of one task has value for the execution of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-09-06 Christos Dimitrakakis

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