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Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a variant of RL where the policy is learned from a previously collected dataset of trajectories and rewards. In our work, we propose a practical approach to offline RL with large language models…

In deep reinforcement learning (RL) research, there has been a concerted effort to design more efficient and productive exploration methods while solving sparse-reward problems. These exploration methods often share common principles (e.g.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Jonathan C. Balloch , Rishav Bhagat , Geigh Zollicoffer , Ruoran Jia , Julia Kim , Mark O. Riedl

Efficient exploration remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in sparse-reward environments. We introduce Optimistic World Models (OWMs), a principled and scalable framework for optimistic exploration that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Akshay Mete , Shahid Aamir Sheikh , Tzu-Hsiang Lin , Dileep Kalathil , P. R. Kumar

Efficient exploration is necessary to achieve good sample efficiency for reinforcement learning in general. From small, tabular settings such as gridworlds to large, continuous and sparse reward settings such as robotic object manipulation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-20 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Emma Brunskill

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

Crafting effective reward signals remains a central challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL), especially for complex reasoning tasks. Existing automated reward optimization methods typically rely on derivative-free search heuristics that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Sitao Cheng , Tianle Li , Xuhan Huang , Xunjian Yin , Difan Zou

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

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to expand the capabilities of language models, but it is unclear if current RL techniques promote the discovery of novel behaviors, or simply sharpen those already present in the base model. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Jens Tuyls , Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Jordan T. Ash

We present Q-chunking, a simple yet effective recipe for improving reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for long-horizon, sparse-reward tasks. Our recipe is designed for the offline-to-online RL setting, where the goal is to leverage an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Qiyang Li , Zhiyuan Zhou , Sergey Levine

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) is one of the three basic paradigms of machine learning. It has demonstrated impressive performance in many complex tasks like Go and StarCraft, which is increasingly involved in smart manufacturing and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Mingqi Yuan

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

Reinforcement Learning enables to train an agent via interaction with the environment. However, in the majority of real-world scenarios, the extrinsic feedback is sparse or not sufficient, thus intrinsic reward formulations are needed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Patrik Reizinger , Márton Szemenyei

Offline Reinforcement Learning (ORL) enablesus to separately study the two interlinked processes of reinforcement learning: collecting informative experience and inferring optimal behaviour. The second step has been widely studied in the…

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet current RLVR methods often explore poorly, leading to premature convergence and entropy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Runpeng Dai , Linfeng Song , Haolin Liu , Zhenwen Liang , Dian Yu , Haitao Mi , Zhaopeng Tu , Rui Liu , Tong Zheng , Hongtu Zhu , Dong Yu

Incomplete knowledge of the environment leads an agent to make decisions under uncertainty. One of the major dilemmas in Reinforcement Learning (RL) where an autonomous agent has to balance two contrasting needs in making its decisions is:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-21 Valentina Zangirolami , Matteo Borrotti

One of the bottlenecks preventing Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms (DRL) from real-world applications is how to explore the environment and collect informative transitions efficiently. The present paper describes bounded exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Ting Qiao , Henry Williams , David Valencia , Bruce MacDonald

Offline inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover a reward function that explains expert behavior using only fixed demonstration data, without any additional online interaction. We propose BiCQL-ML, a policy-free offline IRL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Junsung Park

We propose an exploration method that incorporates look-ahead search over basic learnt skills and their dynamics, and use it for reinforcement learning (RL) of manipulation policies . Our skills are multi-goal policies learned in isolation…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-11-21 Arpit Agarwal , Katharina Muelling , Katerina Fragkiadaki