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For many tasks, the reward function is inaccessible to introspection or too complex to be specified procedurally, and must instead be learned from user data. Prior work has evaluated learned reward functions by evaluating policies optimized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Adam Gleave , Michael Dennis , Shane Legg , Stuart Russell , Jan Leike

Anomaly detection in time series data is important for applications in finance, healthcare, sensor networks, and industrial monitoring. Traditional methods usually struggle with limited labeled data, high false-positive rates, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Bahareh Golchin , Banafsheh Rekabdar , Kunpeng Liu

Exploration in sparse reward reinforcement learning remains an open challenge. Many state-of-the-art methods use intrinsic motivation to complement the sparse extrinsic reward signal, giving the agent more opportunities to receive feedback…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-24 Jingwei Zhang , Niklas Wetzel , Nicolai Dorka , Joschka Boedecker , Wolfram Burgard

Sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) can model a wide range of highly complex tasks. Solving sparse-reward tasks is RL's core premise, requiring efficient exploration coupled with long-horizon credit assignment, and overcoming these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Leander Diaz-Bone , Marco Bagatella , Jonas Hübotter , Andreas Krause

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves LLM reasoning, yet growing evidence indicates an exploration ceiling: it often reweights existing solution traces rather than discovering new strategies, limiting gains under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Bizhe Bai , Xinyue Wang , Peng Ye , Tao Chen

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, existing group-based RLVR methods often suffer from severe…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Haechan Kim , Soohyun Ryu , Gyouk Chu , Doohyuk Jang , Eunho Yang

Efficient exploration remains a major challenge for reinforcement learning. One reason is that the variability of the returns often depends on the current state and action, and is therefore heteroscedastic. Classical exploration strategies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-26 Nikolay Nikolov , Johannes Kirschner , Felix Berkenkamp , Andreas Krause

In reinforcement learning (RL), agents continually interact with the environment and use the feedback to refine their behavior. To guide policy optimization, reward models are introduced as proxies of the desired objectives, such that when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Rui Yu , Shenghua Wan , Yucen Wang , Chen-Xiao Gao , Le Gan , Zongzhang Zhang , De-Chuan Zhan

The exploration \& exploitation dilemma poses significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, curiosity-based exploration methods achieved great success in tackling hard-exploration problems. However, they necessitate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Yiran Wang , Chenshu Liu , Yunfan Li , Sanae Amani , Bolei Zhou , Lin F. Yang

In reinforcement learning, two objective functions have been developed extensively in the literature: discounted and averaged rewards. The generalization to an entropy-regularized setting has led to improved robustness and exploration for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-20 Jacob Adamczyk , Volodymyr Makarenko , Stas Tiomkin , Rahul V. Kulkarni

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has recently demonstrated remarkable potential in enhancing the reasoning capability of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). However, RLVR often drives the policy toward over-determinism,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Shimin Zhang , Xianwei Chen , Yufan Shen , Ziyuan Ye , Jibin Wu

Reward engineering and designing an incentive reward function are non-trivial tasks to train agents in complex environments. Furthermore, an inaccurate reward function may lead to a biased behaviour which is far from an efficient and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-05-04 Saeed Tafazzol , Erfan Fathi , Mahdi Rezaei , Ehsan Asali

Numerous heuristics and advanced approaches have been proposed for exploration in different settings for deep reinforcement learning. Noise-based exploration generally fares well with dense-shaped rewards and bonus-based exploration with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Sebastian Griesbach , Carlo D'Eramo

Efficient exploration is a challenging topic in reinforcement learning, especially for sparse reward tasks. To deal with the reward sparsity, people commonly apply intrinsic rewards to motivate agents to explore the state space efficiently.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-29 Yao Fu , Run Peng , Honglak Lee

In this paper we address the challenge of exploration in deep reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation tasks. In sparse goal settings, an agent does not receive any positive feedback until randomly achieving the goal, which becomes…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-23 Nikola Vulin , Sammy Christen , Stefan Stevsic , Otmar Hilliges

Reinforcement learning is concerned with identifying reward-maximizing behaviour policies in environments that are initially unknown. State-of-the-art reinforcement learning approaches, such as deep Q-networks, are model-free and learn to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-08-18 Felix Leibfried , Nate Kushman , Katja Hofmann

We propose Deep Q-Networks (DQN) with model-based exploration, an algorithm combining both model-free and model-based approaches that explores better and learns environments with sparse rewards more efficiently. DQN is a general-purpose,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-25 Stephen Zhen Gou , Yuyang Liu

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

This work pushes the boundaries of learning-based methods in autonomous robot exploration in terms of environmental scale and exploration efficiency. We present HEADER, an attention-based reinforcement learning approach with hierarchical…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Yuhong Cao , Yizhuo Wang , Jingsong Liang , Shuhao Liao , Yifeng Zhang , Peizhuo Li , Guillaume Sartoretti

Recent advances in large reasoning models have leveraged reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to improve reasoning capabilities. However, scaling these methods typically requires extensive rollout computation and large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Xinyu Tang , Zhenduo Zhang , Yurou Liu , Wayne Xin Zhao , Zujie Wen , Zhiqiang Zhang , Jun Zhou