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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

The increasing prevalence of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 in various applications has led to a surge in the size of prompts required for optimal performance, leading to challenges in computational efficiency. Prompt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Shivam Shandilya , Menglin Xia , Supriyo Ghosh , Huiqiang Jiang , Jue Zhang , Qianhui Wu , Victor Rühle

Reward machines are an established tool for dealing with reinforcement learning problems in which rewards are sparse and depend on complex sequences of actions. However, existing algorithms for learning reward machines assume an overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Jan Corazza , Ivan Gavran , Daniel Neider

A strong preference for novelty emerges in infancy and is prevalent across the animal kingdom. When incorporated into reinforcement-based machine learning algorithms, visual novelty can act as an intrinsic reward signal that vastly…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2019-01-10 Andrew Jaegle , Vahid Mehrpour , Nicole Rust

Reinforcement learning for embodied agents is a challenging problem. The accumulated reward to be optimized is often a very rugged function, and gradient methods are impaired by many local optimizers. We demonstrate, in an experimental…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-06-01 Guido Montufar , Keyan Ghazi-Zahedi , Nihat Ay

Despite the fact that deep reinforcement learning (RL) has surpassed human-level performances in various tasks, it still has several fundamental challenges. First, most RL methods require intensive data from the exploration of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Zhe Xu , Bo Wu , Aditya Ojha , Daniel Neider , Ufuk Topcu

This paper presents an interpretable reward design framework for reinforcement learning based constrained optimal control problems with state and terminal constraints. The problem is formalized within a standard partially observable Markov…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-05 Jingjie Ni , Fangfei Li , Xin Jin , Xianlun Peng , Yang Tang

Consider the problem of exploration in sparse-reward or reward-free environments, such as in Montezuma's Revenge. In the curiosity-driven paradigm, the agent is rewarded for how much each realized outcome differs from their predicted…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-21 Daniel Jarrett , Corentin Tallec , Florent Altché , Thomas Mesnard , Rémi Munos , Michal Valko

Episodic memory-based methods can rapidly latch onto past successful strategies by a non-parametric memory and improve sample efficiency of traditional reinforcement learning. However, little effort is put into the continuous domain, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-14 Hao Hu , Jianing Ye , Guangxiang Zhu , Zhizhou Ren , Chongjie Zhang

Exploration and credit assignment under sparse rewards are still challenging problems. We argue that these challenges arise in part due to the intrinsic rigidity of operating at the level of actions. Actions can precisely define how to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Oriol Corcoll , Raul Vicente

This paper studies reward-agnostic exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) -- a scenario where the learner is unware of the reward functions during the exploration stage -- and designs an algorithm that improves over the state of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Gen Li , Yuling Yan , Yuxin Chen , Jianqing Fan

Active Feature Acquisition is an instance-wise, sequential decision making problem. The aim is to dynamically select which feature to measure based on current observations, independently for each test instance. Common approaches either use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Alexander Norcliffe , Changhee Lee , Fergus Imrie , Mihaela van der Schaar , Pietro Lio

Exploration in environments with sparse feedback remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning (RL). When the RL agent explores the environment randomly, it results in low exploration efficiency, especially in robotic…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Boyao Li , Tao Lu , Jiayi Li , Ning Lu , Yinghao Cai , Shuo Wang

While recent progress in deep reinforcement learning has enabled robots to learn complex behaviors, tasks with long horizons and sparse rewards remain an ongoing challenge. In this work, we propose an effective reward shaping method through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Xingyu Lu , Stas Tiomkin , Pieter Abbeel

In the early stages of human life, babies develop their skills by exploring different scenarios motivated by their inherent satisfaction rather than by extrinsic rewards from the environment. This behavior, referred to as intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-25 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

We introduce Random Latent Exploration (RLE), a simple yet effective exploration strategy in reinforcement learning (RL). On average, RLE outperforms noise-based methods, which perturb the agent's actions, and bonus-based exploration, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Srinath Mahankali , Zhang-Wei Hong , Ayush Sekhari , Alexander Rakhlin , Pulkit Agrawal

An autonomous agent embodied in a humanoid robot, in order to learn from the overwhelming flow of raw and noisy sensory, has to effectively reduce the high spatial-temporal data dimensionality. In this paper we propose a novel method of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-04-11 Wojciech Skaba

We study the problem of episodic reinforcement learning in continuous state-action spaces with unknown rewards and transitions. Specifically, we consider the setting where the rewards and transitions are modeled using parametric bilinear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Reda Ouhamma , Debabrota Basu , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard

We investigate the exploration of an unknown environment when no reward function is provided. Building on the incremental exploration setting introduced by Lim and Auer [1], we define the objective of learning the set of $\epsilon$-optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Jean Tarbouriech , Matteo Pirotta , Michal Valko , Alessandro Lazaric

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn an optimal policy from pre-collected and labeled datasets, which eliminates the time-consuming data collection in online RL. However, offline RL still bears a large burden of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Jinxin Liu , Lipeng Zu , Li He , Donglin Wang