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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

This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-17 Ofir Nachum , Mohammad Norouzi , Dale Schuurmans

Effective and intelligent exploration has been an unresolved problem for reinforcement learning. Most contemporary reinforcement learning relies on simple heuristic strategies such as $\epsilon$-greedy exploration or adding Gaussian noise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Muhammad Usama , Dong Eui Chang

This paper proposes \emph{Episodic and Lifelong Exploration via Maximum ENTropy} (ELEMENT), a novel, multiscale, intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning (RL) framework that is able to explore environments without using any extrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Hongming Li , Shujian Yu , Bin Liu , Jose C. Principe

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), artificial agents are trained to maximize numerical rewards by performing tasks. Exploration is essential in RL because agents must discover information before exploiting it. Two rewards encouraging efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-14 Theodore Jerome Tinker , Kenji Doya , Jun Tani

Sparsity of rewards while applying a deep reinforcement learning method negatively affects its sample-efficiency. A viable solution to deal with the sparsity of rewards is to learn via intrinsic motivation which advocates for adding an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Jiong Li , Pratik Gajane

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

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

In the last few years, the research activity around reinforcement learning tasks formulated over environments with sparse rewards has been especially notable. Among the numerous approaches proposed to deal with these hard exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Simone Parisi , Davide Tateo , Maximilian Hensel , Carlo D'Eramo , Jan Peters , Joni Pajarinen

In this study, we address the problem of efficient exploration in reinforcement learning. Most common exploration approaches depend on random action selection, however these approaches do not work well in environments with sparse or no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-30 Doğay Kamar , Nazım Kemal Üre , Gözde Ünal

We address the challenge of exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) when the agent operates in an unknown environment with sparse or no rewards. In this work, we study the maximum entropy exploration problem of two different types. The…

Exploration is a crucial and distinctive aspect of reinforcement learning (RL) that remains a fundamental open problem. Several methods have been proposed to tackle this challenge. Commonly used methods inject random noise directly into the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Sebastian Griesbach , Carlo D'Eramo

Intrinsic motivation enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to explore when rewards are very sparse, where traditional exploration heuristics such as Boltzmann or e-greedy would typically fail. However, intrinsic exploration is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Philippe Morere , Fabio Ramos

Efficient exploration remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, serving as a useful pretraining objective for data collection, particularly when an external reward function is unavailable. A principled formulation of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Jacob Adamczyk , Adam Kamoski , Rahul V. Kulkarni

In recent years, deep reinforcement learning has been shown to be adept at solving sequential decision processes with high-dimensional state spaces such as in the Atari games. Many reinforcement learning problems, however, involve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-05 Yiming Zhang , Quan Ho Vuong , Kenny Song , Xiao-Yue Gong , Keith W. Ross

Encouraging exploration is a critical issue in deep reinforcement learning. We investigate the effect of initial entropy that significantly influences the exploration, especially at the earlier stage. Our main observations are as follows:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Sooyoung Jang , Hyung-Il Kim

Sparse reward environments are known to be challenging for reinforcement learning agents. In such environments, efficient and scalable exploration is crucial. Exploration is a means by which an agent gains information about the environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Jacob Chmura , Hasham Burhani , Xiao Qi Shi

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

This paper reviews exploration techniques in deep reinforcement learning. Exploration techniques are of primary importance when solving sparse reward problems. In sparse reward problems, the reward is rare, which means that the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Pawel Ladosz , Lilian Weng , Minwoo Kim , Hyondong Oh