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We consider the problem of reinforcement learning under safety requirements, in which an agent is trained to complete a given task, typically formalized as the maximization of a reward signal over time, while concurrently avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Tu-Hoa Pham , Giovanni De Magistris , Don Joven Agravante , Subhajit Chaudhury , Asim Munawar , Ryuki Tachibana

Both entropy-minimizing and entropy-maximizing (curiosity) objectives for unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) have been shown to be effective in different environments, depending on the environment's level of natural entropy. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Adriana Hugessen , Roger Creus Castanyer , Faisal Mohamed , Glen Berseth

Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning have been hindered by a persistent challenge: exploration collapse. The semantic homogeneity of random rollouts often traps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Huilin Deng , Hongchen Luo , Yue Zhu , Long Li , Zhuoyue Chen , Xinghao Zhao , Ming Li , Jihai Zhang , Mengchang Wang , Yang Cao , Yu Kang

Exploration is an extremely challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially in high dimensional state and action spaces and when only sparse rewards are available. Effective representations can indicate which components of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Giulia Vezzani , Abhishek Gupta , Lorenzo Natale , Pieter Abbeel

Humans and animals explore their environment and acquire useful skills even in the absence of clear goals, exhibiting intrinsic motivation. The study of intrinsic motivation in artificial agents is concerned with the following question:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Nicholas Rhinehart , Jenny Wang , Glen Berseth , John D. Co-Reyes , Danijar Hafner , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated notable progress in sample efficiency, spanning both model-based and model-free paradigms. Despite the identification and mitigation of specific bottlenecks in prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yibo Wang , Jiang Zhao

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

We propose and analyze a continuous-time robust reinforcement learning framework for optimal stopping under ambiguity. In this framework, an agent chooses a robust exploratory stopping time motivated by two objectives: robust…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-17 Junyan Ye , Hoi Ying Wong , Kyunghyun Park

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

Deep Neural Nets (DNNs) learn latent representations induced by their downstream task, objective function, and other parameters. The quality of the learned representations impacts the DNN's generalization ability and the coherence of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Nir Weingarten , Zohar Yakhini , Moshe Butman , Ran Gilad-Bachrach

Reinforcement learning has been shown to be highly successful at many challenging tasks. However, success heavily relies on well-shaped rewards. Intrinsically motivated RL attempts to remove this constraint by defining an intrinsic reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Rui Zhao , Yang Gao , Pieter Abbeel , Volker Tresp , Wei Xu

In many applications, it is desirable to extract only the relevant information from complex input data, which involves making a decision about which input features are relevant. The information bottleneck method formalizes this as an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-04-28 Anirudh Goyal , Yoshua Bengio , Matthew Botvinick , Sergey Levine

Information bottleneck is an information-theoretic principle of representation learning that aims to learn a maximally compressed representation that preserves as much information about labels as possible. Under this principle, two…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Yuyan Ni , Yanyan Lan , Ao Liu , Zhiming Ma

The Information Bottleneck principle offers both a mechanism to explain how deep neural networks train and generalize, as well as a regularized objective with which to train models. However, multiple competing objectives are proposed in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-06 Andreas Kirsch , Clare Lyle , Yarin Gal

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

One of the main challenges in the field of embodied artificial intelligence is the open-ended autonomous learning of complex behaviours. Our approach is to use task-independent, information-driven intrinsic motivation(s) to support…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-09-27 Keyan Zahedi , Georg Martius , Nihat Ay

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

The information bottleneck principle provides an information-theoretic method for representation learning, by training an encoder to retain all information which is relevant for predicting the label while minimizing the amount of other,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Marco Federici , Anjan Dutta , Patrick Forré , Nate Kushman , Zeynep Akata

We propose a novel strategy for extracting features in supervised learning that can be used to construct a classifier which is more robust to small perturbations in the input space. Our method builds upon the idea of the information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-16 Ankit Pensia , Varun Jog , Po-Ling Loh

What is a good exploration strategy for an agent that interacts with an environment in the absence of external rewards? Ideally, we would like to get a policy driving towards a uniform state-action visitation (highly exploring) in a minimum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-20 Mirco Mutti , Marcello Restelli