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Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Minjae Cho , Huy Trong Tran

High-dimensional observations and complex real-world dynamics present major challenges in reinforcement learning for both function approximation and exploration. We address both of these challenges with two complementary techniques: First,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-03-15 David Abel , Alekh Agarwal , Fernando Diaz , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Robert E. Schapire

Exploration in complex domains is a key challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks with very sparse rewards. Recent successes in deep reinforcement learning have been achieved mostly using simple heuristic exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-07 Joshua Achiam , Shankar Sastry

Agentic RAG is a powerful technique for incorporating external information that LLMs lack, enabling better problem solving and question answering. However, suboptimal search behaviors exist widely, such as over-search (retrieving…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Peilin Wu , Mian Zhang , Kun Wan , Wentian Zhao , Kaiyu He , Xinya Du , Zhiyu Chen

Long-horizon contact-rich tasks are challenging to learn with reinforcement learning, due to ineffective exploration of high-dimensional state spaces with sparse rewards. The learning process often gets stuck in local optimum and demands…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Xiaofeng Mao , Yucheng Xu , Zhaole Sun , Elle Miller , Daniel Layeghi , Michael Mistry

Reinforcement learning algorithms struggle on tasks with complex hierarchical dependency structures. Humans and other intelligent agents do not waste time assessing the utility of every high-level action in existence, but instead only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-25 Robby Costales , Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) is a promising approach to extend traditional reinforcement learning (RL) methods to solve more complex tasks. Yet, the majority of current HRL methods require careful task-specific design and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-08 Ofir Nachum , Shixiang Gu , Honglak Lee , Sergey Levine

Exploration in sparse reward environments remains one of the key challenges of model-free reinforcement learning. Instead of solely relying on extrinsic rewards provided by the environment, many state-of-the-art methods use intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Roberta Raileanu , Tim Rocktäschel

Contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) achieves cutting-edge performance on a variety of problems. When it comes to real-world scenarios such as recommendation system and online advertising, however, it is essential to consider the resource…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Mengyue Yang , Qingyang Li , Zhiwei Qin , Jieping Ye

Common approaches to Reinforcement Learning (RL) are seriously challenged by large-scale applications involving huge state spaces and sparse delayed reward feedback. Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) methods attempt to address this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-04-15 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

Robotic systems are nowadays capable of solving complex navigation tasks. However, their capabilities are limited to the knowledge of the designer and consequently lack generalizability to initially unconsidered situations. This makes deep…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Christopher Gebauer , Nils Dengler , Maren Bennewitz

Training agents using Reinforcement Learning in games with sparse rewards is a challenging problem, since large amounts of exploration are required to retrieve even the first reward. To tackle this problem, a common approach is to use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-09 Shengyi Huang , Santiago Ontañón

In swarm robotics, confrontation including the pursuit-evasion game is a key scenario. High uncertainty caused by unknown opponents' strategies, dynamic obstacles, and insufficient training complicates the action space into a hybrid…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Qizhen Wu , Kexin Liu , Lei Chen , Jinhu Lü

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task. This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Dhawal Gupta , Yash Chandak , Scott M. Jordan , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

Exploration under sparse reward is a long-standing challenge of model-free reinforcement learning. The state-of-the-art methods address this challenge by introducing intrinsic rewards to encourage exploration in novel states or uncertain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-05 Daochen Zha , Wenye Ma , Lei Yuan , Xia Hu , Ji Liu

Real-world tasks are often highly structured. Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) has attracted research interest as an approach for leveraging the hierarchical structure of a given task in reinforcement learning (RL). However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-08 Takayuki Osa , Voot Tangkaratt , Masashi Sugiyama

In many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL), performing actions requires consuming certain types of resources that are non-replenishable in each episode. Typical applications include robotic control with limited energy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Zhihai Wang , Taoxing Pan , Qi Zhou , Jie Wang

Long-horizon precision manipulation in laboratory automation, such as pipette tip attachment and liquid transfer, requires policies that respect strict procedural logic while operating in continuous, high-dimensional state spaces. However,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yibo Qiu , Shu'ang Sun , Haoliang Ye , Ronald X Xu , Mingzhai Sun

In this paper, we propose an enhanced approach for Rapid Exploration and eXploitation for AI Agents called REX. Existing AutoGPT-style techniques have inherent limitations, such as a heavy reliance on precise descriptions for…