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Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for those tasks where rewards from environments are sparse. A commonly used approach for exploring such environments is to introduce some "intrinsic"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Neale Ratzlaff , Qinxun Bai , Li Fuxin , Wei Xu

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

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

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

Recent advancements have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) can substantially improve the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). The effectiveness of such RL training, however, depends critically on the exploration space…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Haoyuan Wu , Hai Wang , Jiajia Wu , Jinxiang Ou , Keyao Wang , Weile Chen , Zihao Zheng , Bei Yu

Effective exploration is critical for reinforcement learning agents in environments with sparse rewards or high-dimensional state-action spaces. Recent works based on state-visitation counts, curiosity and entropy-maximization generate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Bang You , Jingming Xie , Youping Chen , Jan Peters , Oleg Arenz

Myopic exploration policies such as epsilon-greedy, softmax, or Gaussian noise fail to explore efficiently in some reinforcement learning tasks and yet, they perform well in many others. In fact, in practice, they are often selected as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Christoph Dann , Yishay Mansour , Mehryar Mohri , Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan

The scientific method relies on the iterated processes of inference and inquiry. The inference phase consists of selecting the most probable models based on the available data; whereas the inquiry phase consists of using what is known about…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-05-19 N. K. Malakar , K. H. Knuth

One of the main challenges in reinforcement learning is solving tasks with sparse reward. We show that the difficulty of discovering a distant rewarding state in an MDP is bounded by the expected cover time of a random walk over the graph…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-03-19 Yuu Jinnai , Jee Won Park , David Abel , George Konidaris

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to balance exploiting the current best strategy with exploring new options that could lead to higher rewards. Most common RL algorithms use undirected exploration, i.e., select random sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Bhavya Sukhija , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause , Pieter Abbeel , Carmelo Sferrazza

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

Having access to an exploring restart distribution (the so-called wide coverage assumption) is critical with policy gradient methods. This is due to the fact that, while the objective function is insensitive to updates in unlikely states,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-30 Marco Miani , Maurizio Parton , Marco Romito

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms have been shown to learn complex tasks using highly general policy classes. However, sparse reward problems remain a significant challenge. Exploration methods based on novelty detection have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-30 Justin Fu , John D. Co-Reyes , Sergey Levine

We present a new model-based algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) which consists of explicit exploration and exploitation phases, and is applicable in large or infinite state spaces. The algorithm maintains a set of dynamics models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Mikael Henaff

Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Simone Parisi , Alireza Kazemipour , Michael Bowling

Exploration is a key problem in reinforcement learning, since agents can only learn from data they acquire in the environment. With that in mind, maintaining a population of agents is an attractive method, as it allows data be collected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Jack Parker-Holder , Aldo Pacchiano , Krzysztof Choromanski , Stephen Roberts

Reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when the reward signal is very sparse. In these cases, naive random exploration methods essentially rely on a random walk to stumble onto a rewarding state. Recent works utilize intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-14 Hyoungseok Kim , Jaekyeom Kim , Yeonwoo Jeong , Sergey Levine , Hyun Oh Song

Exploration is a prerequisite for learning useful behaviors in sparse-reward, long-horizon tasks, particularly within 3D environments. Curiosity-driven reinforcement learning addresses this via intrinsic rewards derived from the mismatch…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Lily Goli , Justin Kerr , Daniele Reda , Alec Jacobson , Andrea Tagliasacchi , Angjoo Kanazawa

Most theories of behavior posit that agents tend to maximize some form of reward or utility. However, animals very often move with curiosity and seem to be motivated in a reward-free manner. Here we abandon the idea of reward maximization,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Jorge Ramírez-Ruiz , Dmytro Grytskyy , Chiara Mastrogiuseppe , Yamen Habib , Rubén Moreno-Bote

Autonomous agents that must exhibit flexible and broad capabilities will need to be equipped with large repertoires of skills. Defining each skill with a manually-designed reward function limits this repertoire and imposes a manual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-05 Vitchyr H. Pong , Murtaza Dalal , Steven Lin , Ashvin Nair , Shikhar Bahl , Sergey Levine