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Learning complex robot behavior through interactions with the environment necessitates principled exploration. Effective strategies should prioritize exploring regions of the state-action space that maximize rewards, with optimistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Jasmine Bayrooti , Carl Henrik Ek , Amanda Prorok

We present Reward-Switching Policy Optimization (RSPO), a paradigm to discover diverse strategies in complex RL environments by iteratively finding novel policies that are both locally optimal and sufficiently different from existing ones.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-04 Zihan Zhou , Wei Fu , Bingliang Zhang , Yi Wu

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks where extrinsic rewards from environments are sparse or even totally disregarded. Significant advances based on intrinsic motivation show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Chenjia Bai , Peng Liu , Kaiyu Liu , Lingxiao Wang , Yingnan Zhao , Lei Han

Dealing with environments with sparse rewards has always been crucial for systems developed to operate in autonomous open-ended learning settings. Intrinsic Motivations could be an effective way to help Deep Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Gianluca Maselli , Vieri Giuliano Santucci

In this study, we address the problem of efficient exploration in reinforcement learning. Most common exploration approaches depend on random action selection, however these approaches do not work well in environments with sparse or no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-30 Doğay Kamar , Nazım Kemal Üre , Gözde Ünal

Reward hacking, where a reasoning model exploits loopholes in a reward function to achieve high rewards without solving the intended task, poses a significant threat. This behavior may be explicit, i.e. verbalized in the model's…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Xinpeng Wang , Nitish Joshi , Barbara Plank , Rico Angell , He He

Exploration in complex domains is a key challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks with very sparse rewards. Recent successes in deep reinforcement learning have been achieved mostly using simple heuristic exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-07 Joshua Achiam , Shankar Sastry

One of the open challenges in Reinforcement Learning is the hard exploration problem in sparse reward environments. Various types of intrinsic rewards have been proposed to address this challenge by pushing towards diversity. This diversity…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Aya Kayal , Eduardo Pignatelli , Laura Toni

Sparse-reward domains are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms since significant exploration is needed before encountering reward for the first time. Hierarchical reinforcement learning can facilitate exploration by reducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-13 Lorenzo Steccanella , Simone Totaro , Damien Allonsius , Anders Jonsson

We propose an algorithm for tabular episodic reinforcement learning with constraints. We provide a modular analysis with strong theoretical guarantees for settings with concave rewards and convex constraints, and for settings with hard…

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) has enhanced the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) through reward-driven training. Nevertheless, this process can introduce excessively long responses, inflating inference latency and computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Chang Liu , Yiran Zhao , Lawrence Liu , Yaoqi Ye , Csaba Szepesvári , Lin F. Yang

Well-designed dense reward functions in robot manipulation not only indicate whether a task is completed but also encode progress along the way. Generally, designing dense rewards is challenging and usually requires access to privileged…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Pierre Krack , Tobias Jülg , Wolfram Burgard , Florian Walter

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

Accelerating exploration in visual reinforcement learning under sparse rewards remains challenging due to the substantial task-irrelevant variations. Despite advances in intrinsic exploration, many methods either assume access to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Dayang Liang , Ruihan Liu , Lipeng Wan , Yunlong Liu , Bo An

Large reasoning models have achieved remarkable performance through extended chain-of-thought sequences, yet this computational freedom leads to excessive token generation even for simple problems. We present Length-Adaptive Policy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Xingyu Wu , Yuchen Yan , Shangke Lyu , Linjuan Wu , Yiwen Qiu , Yongliang Shen , Weiming Lu , Jian Shao , Jun Xiao , Yueting Zhuang

In the realm of multi-agent reinforcement learning, intrinsic motivations have emerged as a pivotal tool for exploration. While the computation of many intrinsic rewards relies on estimating variational posteriors using neural network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Chenghao Li , Tonghan Wang , Chongjie Zhang , Qianchuan Zhao

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

The broader application of reinforcement learning (RL) is limited by challenges including data efficiency, generalization capability, and ability to learn in sparse-reward environments. Meta-learning has emerged as a promising approach to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Octavio Pappalardo , Rodrigo Ramele , Juan Miguel Santos

This work presents an architecture that generates curiosity-driven goal-directed exploration behaviours for an image sensor of a microfarming robot. A combination of deep neural networks for offline unsupervised learning of low-dimensional…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Guido Schillaci , Antonio Pico Villalpando , Verena Vanessa Hafner , Peter Hanappe , David Colliaux , Timothée Wintz