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This paper explores the combination of two intrinsic motivation strategies to improve the efficiency of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in environments with extreme sparse rewards, where traditional learning struggles due to infrequent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 André Quadros , Cassio Silva , Ronnie Alves

Lifelong learners must recognize concept vocabularies that evolve over time. A common yet underexplored scenario is learning with class labels that continually refine/expand old classes. For example, humans learn to recognize ${\tt dog}$…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Zhiqiu Lin , Deepak Pathak , Yu-Xiong Wang , Deva Ramanan , Shu Kong

The study of exploration in the domain of decision making has a long history but remains actively debated. From the vast literature that addressed this topic for decades under various points of view (e.g., developmental psychology,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-14 Léonard Hussenot , Robert Dadashi , Matthieu Geist , Olivier Pietquin

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

We consider scenarios from the real-time strategy game StarCraft as new benchmarks for reinforcement learning algorithms. We propose micromanagement tasks, which present the problem of the short-term, low-level control of army members…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-11-29 Nicolas Usunier , Gabriel Synnaeve , Zeming Lin , Soumith Chintala

Training a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) model with a sparse reward is generally difficult because numerous combinations of interactions among agents induce a certain outcome (i.e., success or failure). Earlier studies have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Heechang Ryu , Hayong Shin , Jinkyoo Park

In multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), effective exploration is critical, especially in sparse reward environments. Although introducing global intrinsic rewards can foster exploration in such settings, it often complicates credit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Xinran Li , Zifan Liu , Shibo Chen , Jun Zhang

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning, particularly in environments where external rewards are sparse. Here we focus on exploration with intrinsic rewards, where the agent transiently augments the external rewards with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Changmin Yu , Neil Burgess , Maneesh Sahani , Samuel J. Gershman

Few-shot meta-learning presents a challenge for gradient descent optimization due to the limited number of training samples per task. To address this issue, we propose an episodic memory optimization for meta-learning, we call EMO, which is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Yingjun Du , Jiayi Shen , Xiantong Zhen , Cees G. M. Snoek

Traditional exploration methods in RL require agents to perform random actions to find rewards. But these approaches struggle on sparse-reward domains like Montezuma's Revenge where the probability that any random action sequence leads to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-11-27 Christopher Stanton , Jeff Clune

Exploration in reinforcement learning is a challenging problem: in the worst case, the agent must search for high-reward states that could be hidden anywhere in the state space. Can we define a more tractable class of RL problems, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Kevin Li , Abhishek Gupta , Ashwin Reddy , Vitchyr Pong , Aurick Zhou , Justin Yu , Sergey Levine

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is critical for improving the interpretability and reliability of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, existing training algorithms such as SFT, PPO, and GRPO may not generalize well across unseen…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Guohao Sun , Hang Hua , Jian Wang , Jiebo Luo , Sohail Dianat , Majid Rabbani , Raghuveer Rao , Zhiqiang Tao

Intrinsic rewards can improve exploration in reinforcement learning, but the exploration process may suffer from instability caused by non-stationary reward shaping and strong dependency on hyperparameters. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Lukas Schäfer , Filippos Christianos , Josiah P. Hanna , Stefano V. Albrecht

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Simone Parisi , Davide Tateo , Maximilian Hensel , Carlo D'Eramo , Jan Peters , Joni Pajarinen

We present AIRS: Automatic Intrinsic Reward Shaping that intelligently and adaptively provides high-quality intrinsic rewards to enhance exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). More specifically, AIRS selects shaping function from a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Mingqi Yuan , Bo Li , Xin Jin , Wenjun Zeng

To rapidly learn a new task, it is often essential for agents to explore efficiently -- especially when performance matters from the first timestep. One way to learn such behaviour is via meta-learning. Many existing methods however rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-11 Luisa Zintgraf , Leo Feng , Cong Lu , Maximilian Igl , Kristian Hartikainen , Katja Hofmann , Shimon Whiteson

Reward shaping allows reinforcement learning (RL) agents to accelerate learning by receiving additional reward signals. However, these signals can be difficult to design manually, especially for complex RL tasks. We propose a simple and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-11 Niels Justesen , Sebastian Risi

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 work in the field of developmental cognitive robotics aims to devise a new domain bridging between reinforcement learning and imitation learning, with a model of the intrinsic motivation for learning agents to learn with guidance from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Sao Mai Nguyen

Transfer and adaptation to new unknown environmental dynamics is a key challenge for reinforcement learning (RL). An even greater challenge is performing near-optimally in a single attempt at test time, possibly without access to dense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-14 Jiachen Yang , Brenden Petersen , Hongyuan Zha , Daniel Faissol