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Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to be often unsuccessful in environments with sparse extrinsic rewards. A possible countermeasure is to endow RL agents with an intrinsic reward function, or 'intrinsic motivation', which rewards the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Francesco Massari , Martin Biehl , Lisa Meeden , Ryota Kanai

Small language models (SLMs) struggle with complex reasoning because exploration is expensive under tight compute budgets. We introduce Semantic Diversity-Exploration-Exploitation (SD-E$^2$), a reinforcement learning framework that makes…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Kshitij Mishra , Nils Lukas , Salem Lahlou

For compressed sensing over arbitrarily connected networks, we consider the problem of estimating underlying sparse signals in a distributed manner. We introduce a new signal model that helps to describe inter-signal correlation among…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2013-10-29 Dennis Sundman , Saikat Chatterjee , Mikael Skoglund

In many real-world scenarios, reward signal for agents are exceedingly sparse, making it challenging to learn an effective reward function for reward shaping. To address this issue, the proposed approach in this paper performs reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Wenyun Li , Wenjie Huang , Chen Sun

Sample-efficient exploration is crucial not only for discovering rewarding experiences but also for adapting to environment changes in a task-agnostic fashion. A principled treatment of the problem of optimal input synthesis for system…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-10 Matthias Schultheis , Boris Belousov , Hany Abdulsamad , Jan Peters

Designing suitable rewards poses a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), especially for embodied manipulation. Trajectory success rewards are suitable for human judges or model fitting, but the sparsity severely limits RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Xin Liu , Yixuan Li , Yuhui Chen , Yuxing Qin , Haoran Li , Dongbin Zhao

We demonstrate the possibility of what we call sparse learning: accelerated training of deep neural networks that maintain sparse weights throughout training while achieving dense performance levels. We accomplish this by developing sparse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Tim Dettmers , Luke Zettlemoyer

Intelligent agents must pursue their goals in complex environments with partial information and often limited computational capacity. Reinforcement learning methods have achieved great success by creating agents that optimize engineered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Alejandro Daniel Noel , Charel van Hoof , Beren Millidge

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

Deep ensembles have emerged as a powerful technique for improving predictive performance and enhancing model robustness across various applications by leveraging model diversity. However, traditional deep ensemble methods are often…

Pruning aims to accelerate and compress models by removing redundant parameters, identified by specifically designed importance scores which are usually imperfect. This removal is irreversible, often leading to subpar performance in pruned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Xinglong Sun , Maying Shen , Hongxu Yin , Lei Mao , Pavlo Molchanov , Jose M. Alvarez

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

Autonomous systems can be used to search for sparse signals in a large space; e.g., aerial robots can be deployed to localize threats, detect gas leaks, or respond to distress calls. Intuitively, search algorithms may increase efficiency by…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-12-05 Yifei Ma , Roman Garnett , Jeff Schneider

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

To achieve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL), it necessitates efficiently exploring the underlying environment. Under the offline setting, addressing the exploration challenge lies in collecting an offline dataset with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Shuang Qiu , Jieping Ye , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms have been shown to learn complex tasks using highly general policy classes. However, sparse reward problems remain a significant challenge. Exploration methods based on novelty detection have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-30 Justin Fu , John D. Co-Reyes , Sergey Levine

Evolutionary Computation (EC) has been shown to be able to quickly train Deep Artificial Neural Networks (DNNs) to solve Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems. While a Genetic Algorithm (GA) is well-suited for exploiting reward functions…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-09-09 Eyal Segal , Moshe Sipper

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been proven to be exceptionally effective and have been applied across diverse domains within deep learning. However, as DNN models increase in complexity, the demand for reduced computational costs and…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Xiaotian Chen , Hongyun Liu , Seyed Sahand Mohammadi Ziabari

Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Simone Parisi , Alireza Kazemipour , Michael Bowling

We study sparse principal component analysis in the high-dimensional, sample-limited regime, aiming to recover a leading component supported on a few coordinates. Despite extensive progress, most methods and analyses are tailored to the…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Mengchu Xu , Jian Wang , Yonina C. Eldar