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Optimistic value estimates provide one mechanism for directed exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). The agent acts greedily with respect to an estimate of the value plus what can be seen as a value bonus. The value bonus can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Abdul Wahab , Raksha Kumaraswamy , Martha White

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has recently enhanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), particularly for mathematical problem solving. However, a fundamental limitation remains: as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Wenhao Deng , Long Wei , Chenglei Yu , Tailin Wu

One of the open challenges in Reinforcement Learning is the hard exploration problem in sparse reward environments. Various types of intrinsic rewards have been proposed to address this challenge by pushing towards diversity. This diversity…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Aya Kayal , Eduardo Pignatelli , Laura Toni

Information gathering in a partially observable environment can be formulated as a reinforcement learning (RL), problem where the reward depends on the agent's uncertainty. For example, the reward can be the negative entropy of the agent's…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-05-12 Yash Satsangi , Sungsu Lim , Shimon Whiteson , Frans Oliehoek , Martha White

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning under safety requirements, in which an agent is trained to complete a given task, typically formalized as the maximization of a reward signal over time, while concurrently avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Tu-Hoa Pham , Giovanni De Magistris , Don Joven Agravante , Subhajit Chaudhury , Asim Munawar , Ryuki Tachibana

We consider the framework of methods for unconstrained minimization that are, in each iteration, restricted to a model that is only a valid approximation to the objective function on some affine subspace containing an incumbent point. These…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-26 Matt Menickelly

In the era of deep reinforcement learning, making progress is more complex, as the collected experience must be compressed into a deep model for future exploitation and sampling. Many papers have shown that training a deep learning policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Glen Berseth

We study the problem of exploration in Reinforcement Learning and present a novel model-free solution. We adopt an information-theoretical viewpoint and start from the instance-specific lower bound of the number of samples that have to be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Alessio Russo , Alexandre Proutiere

The infamous exploration-exploitation dilemma is one of the oldest and most important problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Deliberate and effective exploration is necessary for RL agents to succeed in most environments. However, until…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-09 Suraj Narayanan Sasikumar

We consider the problem of exploration in meta reinforcement learning. Two new meta reinforcement learning algorithms are suggested: E-MAML and E-$\text{RL}^2$. Results are presented on a novel environment we call `Krazy World' and a set of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-01-15 Bradly C. Stadie , Ge Yang , Rein Houthooft , Xi Chen , Yan Duan , Yuhuai Wu , Pieter Abbeel , Ilya Sutskever

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for robotic navigation, allowing robots to learn through trial and error. However, real-world robotic tasks often suffer from sparse rewards, leading to inefficient exploration and…

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents continually interact with the environment and use the feedback to refine their behavior. To guide policy optimization, reward models are introduced as proxies of the desired objectives, such that when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Rui Yu , Shenghua Wan , Yucen Wang , Chen-Xiao Gao , Le Gan , Zongzhang Zhang , De-Chuan Zhan

The broader application of reinforcement learning (RL) is limited by challenges including data efficiency, generalization capability, and ability to learn in sparse-reward environments. Meta-learning has emerged as a promising approach to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Octavio Pappalardo , Rodrigo Ramele , Juan Miguel Santos

Current critic-free RL methods for large reasoning models suffer from severe inefficiency when training on positive homogeneous prompts (where all rollouts are correct), resulting in waste of rollouts due to zero advantage estimates. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Shuyang Jiang , Yuhao Wang , Ya Zhang , Yanfeng Wang , Yu Wang

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

Efficient exploration under sparse rewards remains a key challenge in deep reinforcement learning. To guide exploration, previous work makes extensive use of intrinsic reward (IR). There are many heuristics for IR, including visitation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-17 Tianjun Zhang , Huazhe Xu , Xiaolong Wang , Yi Wu , Kurt Keutzer , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Yuandong Tian

We propose a novel Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) method that mitigates the rigidity of fixed reward structures and the limited flexibility of implicit reward regularization. Building on the Maximum Entropy IRL framework, our approach…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Adib Karimi , Mohammad Mehdi Ebadzadeh

Exploration strategy design is one of the challenging problems in reinforcement learning~(RL), especially when the environment contains a large state space or sparse rewards. During exploration, the agent tries to discover novel areas or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-07 Xiao Ma , Shen-Yi Zhao , Wu-Jun Li

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Feedback (RLVF) has become a key technique for enhancing the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, its reliance on sparse, outcome based rewards, which only indicate if a final…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Ang Li , Zhihang Yuan , Yang Zhang , Shouda Liu , Yisen Wang

This paper proposes a learning algorithm to find a scheduling policy that achieves an optimal delay-power trade-off in communication systems. Reinforcement learning (RL) is used to minimize the expected latency for a given energy constraint…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-06-11 Yu Zhao , Joohyun Lee , Wei Chen