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The advent of large language models (LLMs) has transformed information access and reasoning through open-ended natural language interaction. However, LLMs remain limited by static knowledge, factual hallucinations, and the inability to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Minhua Lin , Zongyu Wu , Zhichao Xu , Hui Liu , Xianfeng Tang , Qi He , Charu Aggarwal , Hui Liu , Xiang Zhang , Suhang Wang

We introduce Random Latent Exploration (RLE), a simple yet effective exploration strategy in reinforcement learning (RL). On average, RLE outperforms noise-based methods, which perturb the agent's actions, and bonus-based exploration, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Srinath Mahankali , Zhang-Wei Hong , Ayush Sekhari , Alexander Rakhlin , Pulkit Agrawal

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

Current reinforcement learning algorithms struggle in sparse and complex environments, most notably in long-horizon manipulation tasks entailing a plethora of different sequences. In this work, we propose the Intrinsically Guided…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-03-08 Eleftherios Triantafyllidis , Filippos Christianos , Zhibin Li

Games are challenging for Reinforcement Learning~(RL) agents due to their reward-sparsity, as rewards are only obtainable after long sequences of deliberate actions. Intrinsic Motivation~(IM) methods -- which introduce exploration rewards…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Leonardo Villalobos-Arias , Grant Forbes , Jianxun Wang , David L Roberts , Arnav Jhala

Autonomous reinforcement learning agents, like children, do not have access to predefined goals and reward functions. They must discover potential goals, learn their own reward functions and engage in their own learning trajectory.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-11 Nicolas Lair , Cédric Colas , Rémy Portelas , Jean-Michel Dussoux , Peter Ford Dominey , Pierre-Yves Oudeyer

This paper explores the combination of two intrinsic motivation strategies to improve the efficiency of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in environments with extreme sparse rewards, where traditional learning struggles due to infrequent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 André Quadros , Cassio Silva , Ronnie Alves

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

Humans integrate multiple sensory modalities (e.g. visual and audio) to build a causal understanding of the physical world. In this work, we propose a novel type of intrinsic motivation for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that encourages the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-07-28 Chuang Gan , Xiaoyu Chen , Phillip Isola , Antonio Torralba , Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Exploration of indoor environments has recently experienced a significant interest, also thanks to the introduction of deep neural agents built in a hierarchical fashion and trained with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) on simulated…

Reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in sparse reward settings, often requires prohibitively large numbers of interactions with the environment, thereby limiting its applicability to complex problems. To address this, several prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Prasoon Goyal , Scott Niekum , Raymond J. Mooney

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been proven its efficiency in capturing users' dynamic interests in recent literature. However, training a DRL agent is challenging, because of the sparse environment in recommender systems (RS), DRL…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Xiaocong Chen , Siyu Wang , Lina Yao , Lianyong Qi , Yong Li

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

In this work we present a technique to use natural language to help reinforcement learning generalize to unseen environments. This technique uses neural machine translation, specifically the use of encoder-decoder networks, to learn…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-09-15 Brent Harrison , Upol Ehsan , Mark O. Riedl

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

Exploration is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), and its effectiveness is a deciding factor in the performance of RL algorithms, especially when facing sparse extrinsic rewards. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Shanchuan Wan , Yujin Tang , Yingtao Tian , Tomoyuki Kaneko

We present a new approach for efficient exploration which leverages a low-dimensional encoding of the environment learned with a combination of model-based and model-free objectives. Our approach uses intrinsic rewards that are based on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-18 Ruo Yu Tao , Vincent François-Lavet , Joelle Pineau

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated notable success in post-training large language models (LLMs) as agents for tasks such as computer use, tool calling, and coding. However, exploration remains a central challenge in RL for LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Andrew Szot , Michael Kirchhof , Omar Attia , Alexander Toshev

We present a new computing model for intrinsic rewards in reinforcement learning that addresses the limitations of existing surprise-driven explorations. The reward is the novelty of the surprise rather than the surprise norm. We estimate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-01 Hung Le , Kien Do , Dung Nguyen , Svetha Venkatesh

In environments with sparse rewards, finding a good inductive bias for exploration is crucial to the agent's success. However, there are two competing goals: novelty search and systematic exploration. While existing approaches such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Stefan Sylvius Wagner , Peter Arndt , Jan Robine , Stefan Harmeling