English
Related papers

Related papers: Sparse Reward Exploration via Novelty Search and E…

200 papers

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents often face challenges in balancing exploration and exploitation, particularly in environments where sparse or dense rewards bias learning. Biological systems, such as human toddlers, naturally navigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Junseok Park , Hyeonseo Yang , Min Whoo Lee , Won-Seok Choi , Minsu Lee , Byoung-Tak Zhang

In this work, we address the challenge of data-efficient exploration in reinforcement learning by examining existing principled, information-theoretic approaches to intrinsic motivation. Specifically, we focus on a class of exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Alberto Caron , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

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

Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) has proven to be a successful framework for leveraging experience from prior tasks to rapidly learn new related tasks, however, current meta-RL approaches struggle to learn in sparse reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-12-03 Charles Packer , Pieter Abbeel , Joseph E. Gonzalez

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

Network spaces have been known as a critical factor in both handcrafted network designs or defining search spaces for Neural Architecture Search (NAS). However, an effective space involves tremendous prior knowledge and/or manual effort,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Min-Fong Hong , Hao-Yun Chen , Min-Hung Chen , Yu-Syuan Xu , Hsien-Kai Kuo , Yi-Min Tsai , Hung-Jen Chen , Kevin Jou

This article proposes a sparse computation-based method for optimizing neural networks for reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. This method combines two ideas: neural network pruning and taking into account input data correlations; it makes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-11 Dmitry Ivanov , Mikhail Kiselev , Denis Larionov

Synchronizing expectations and knowledge about the state of the world is an essential capability for effective collaboration. For robots to effectively collaborate with humans and other autonomous agents, it is critical that they be able to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-01-07 Aaquib Tabrez , Ryan Leonard , Bradley Hayes

We study the Combinatorial Pure Exploration problem with Continuous and Separable reward functions (CPE-CS) in the stochastic multi-armed bandit setting. In a CPE-CS instance, we are given several stochastic arms with unknown distributions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-07 Weiran Huang , Jungseul Ok , Liang Li , Wei Chen

Sparse sensor placement, with various design objectives, has successfully been employed in diverse application areas, particularly for enhanced parameter estimation and receiver performance. The sparse array design criteria are generally…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-01-19 Syed Ali Hamza

Many model selection algorithms rely on sparse dictionary learning to provide interpretable and physics-based governing equations. The optimization algorithms typically use a hard thresholding process to enforce sparse activations in the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-30 Derek W. Jollie , Scott G. McCalla

Improving sample efficiency is central to Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially in environments where the rewards are sparse. Some recent approaches have proposed to specify reward functions as manually designed or learned reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Shuai Han , Mehdi Dastani , Shihan Wang

Reward models (RMs) are critical components of alignment pipelines, yet they exhibit biases toward superficial stylistic cues, preferring better-presented responses over semantically superior ones. Existing debiasing methods typically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Mengyuan Sun , Zhuohao Yu , Weizheng Gu , Shikun Zhang , Wei Ye

Back-stepping experience replay (BER) is a reinforcement learning technique that can accelerate learning efficiency in reversible environments. BER trains an agent with generated back-stepping transitions of collected experiences and normal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Guwen Lyu , Masahiro Sato

Numerous practical medical problems often involve data that possess a combination of both sparse and non-sparse structures. Traditional penalized regularizations techniques, primarily designed for promoting sparsity, are inadequate to…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-11-10 Shun Yu , Yuehan Yang

Autonomous navigation in crowded environments is an open problem with many applications, essential for the coexistence of robots and humans in the smart cities of the future. In recent years, deep reinforcement learning approaches have…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Diego Martinez-Baselga , Luis Riazuelo , Luis Montano

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is an effective method for adapting pre-trained vision models to downstream tasks by tuning a small subset of parameters. Among PEFT methods, sparse tuning achieves superior performance by only…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Shufan Shen , Junshu Sun , Xiangyang Ji , Qingming Huang , Shuhui Wang

We propose Structured Exploration with Achievements (SEA), a multi-stage reinforcement learning algorithm designed for achievement-based environments, a particular type of environment with an internal achievement set. SEA first uses offline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-02 Zihan Zhou , Animesh Garg

Reward comparisons are vital for evaluating differences in agent behaviors induced by a set of reward functions. Most conventional techniques utilize the input reward functions to learn optimized policies, which are then used to compare…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Clement Nyanhongo , Bruno Miranda Henrique , Eugene Santos

In online reinforcement learning (RL), efficient exploration remains particularly challenging in high-dimensional environments with sparse rewards. In low-dimensional environments, where tabular parameterization is possible, count-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-21 Tianjun Zhang , Paria Rashidinejad , Jiantao Jiao , Yuandong Tian , Joseph Gonzalez , Stuart Russell