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Learning to solve tasks from a sparse reward signal is a major challenge for standard reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. However, in the real world, agents rarely need to solve sparse reward tasks entirely from scratch. More often, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-22 Qiyang Li , Jason Zhang , Dibya Ghosh , Amy Zhang , Sergey Levine

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

Reinforcement learning provides an automated framework for learning behaviors from high-level reward specifications, but in practice the choice of reward function can be crucial for good results -- while in principle the reward only needs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Abhishek Gupta , Aldo Pacchiano , Yuexiang Zhai , Sham M. Kakade , Sergey Levine

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

We introduce a class of learning problems where the agent is presented with a series of tasks. Intuitively, if there is relation among those tasks, then the information gained during execution of one task has value for the execution of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-09-06 Christos Dimitrakakis

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

Effective exploration in reinforcement learning requires not only tracking where an agent has been, but also understanding how the agent perceives and represents the world. To learn powerful representations, an agent should actively explore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Faisal Mohamed , Catherine Ji , Benjamin Eysenbach , Glen Berseth

Exploration is a key problem in reinforcement learning. Recently bonus-based methods have achieved considerable successes in environments where exploration is difficult such as Montezuma's Revenge, which assign additional bonuses (e.g.,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-02 Yan Song , Yingfeng Chen , Yujing Hu , Changjie Fan

Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) extracts knowledge from previous tasks and achieves fast adaptation to new tasks. Despite recent progress, efficient exploration in meta-RL remains a key challenge in sparse-reward tasks, as it requires…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-15 Jin Zhang , Jianhao Wang , Hao Hu , Tong Chen , Yingfeng Chen , Changjie Fan , Chongjie Zhang

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

Solving sparse reward tasks through exploration is one of the major challenges in deep reinforcement learning, especially in three-dimensional, partially-observable environments. Critically, the algorithm proposed in this article uses a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Gabriele Libardi , Gianni De Fabritiis

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

Imitation learning is an effective alternative approach to learn a policy when the reward function is sparse. In this paper, we consider a challenging setting where an agent and an expert use different actions from each other. We assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Konrad Zolna , Negar Rostamzadeh , Yoshua Bengio , Sungjin Ahn , Pedro O. Pinheiro

Under sparse extrinsic reward settings, reinforcement learning has remained challenging, despite surging interests in this field. Previous attempts suggest that intrinsic reward can alleviate the issue caused by sparsity. In this article,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Zijian Gao , Kele Xu , Yuanzhao Zhai , Dawei Feng , Bo Ding , XinJun Mao , Huaimin Wang

This paper surveys the field of reinforcement learning from a computer-science perspective. It is written to be accessible to researchers familiar with machine learning. Both the historical basis of the field and a broad selection of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-11-17 L. P. Kaelbling , M. L. Littman , A. W. Moore

Numerous past works have tackled the problem of task-driven navigation. But, how to effectively explore a new environment to enable a variety of down-stream tasks has received much less attention. In this work, we study how agents can…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-03-06 Tao Chen , Saurabh Gupta , Abhinav Gupta

Reinforcement learning is commonly applied in residential energy management, particularly for optimizing energy costs. However, RL agents often face challenges when dealing with deceptive and sparse rewards in the energy control domain,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Junlin Lu , Patrick Mannion , Karl Mason

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

Reinforcement learning can solve decision-making problems and train an agent to behave in an environment according to a predesigned reward function. However, such an approach becomes very problematic if the reward is too sparse and so the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Matej Pecháč , Michal Chovanec , Igor Farkaš

In continuous action domains, standard deep reinforcement learning algorithms like DDPG suffer from inefficient exploration when facing sparse or deceptive reward problems. Conversely, evolutionary and developmental methods focusing on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-21 Cédric Colas , Olivier Sigaud , Pierre-Yves Oudeyer