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Maximum entropy reinforcement learning motivates agents to explore states and actions to maximize the entropy of some distribution, typically by providing additional intrinsic rewards proportional to that entropy function. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

One of the most critical challenges in deep reinforcement learning is to maintain the long-term exploration capability of the agent. To tackle this problem, it has been recently proposed to provide intrinsic rewards for the agent to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Mingqi Yuan , Man-on Pun , Dong Wang

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Xinran Liang , Katherine Shu , Kimin Lee , Pieter Abbeel

In online reinforcement learning (RL), efficient exploration remains particularly challenging in high-dimensional environments with sparse rewards. In low-dimensional environments, where tabular parameterization is possible, count-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-21 Tianjun Zhang , Paria Rashidinejad , Jiantao Jiao , Yuandong Tian , Joseph Gonzalez , Stuart Russell

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm is a deep reinforcement learning algorithm with outstanding performance, especially in continuous control tasks. But the performance of this method is still affected by its exploration ability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Junwei Zhang , Zhenghao Zhang , Shuai Han , Shuai Lü

Reinforcement learning algorithms rely on carefully engineering environment rewards that are extrinsic to the agent. However, annotating each environment with hand-designed, dense rewards is not scalable, motivating the need for developing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-14 Yuri Burda , Harri Edwards , Deepak Pathak , Amos Storkey , Trevor Darrell , Alexei A. Efros

Mastering deep reinforcement learning (DRL) proves challenging in tasks featuring scant rewards. These limited rewards merely signify whether the task is partially or entirely accomplished, necessitating various exploration actions before…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-11 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang

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

In the last few years, the research activity around reinforcement learning tasks formulated over environments with sparse rewards has been especially notable. Among the numerous approaches proposed to deal with these hard exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

A grand challenge in reinforcement learning is intelligent exploration, especially when rewards are sparse or deceptive. Two Atari games serve as benchmarks for such hard-exploration domains: Montezuma's Revenge and Pitfall. On both games,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Adrien Ecoffet , Joost Huizinga , Joel Lehman , Kenneth O. Stanley , Jeff Clune

We introduce an exploration bonus for deep reinforcement learning methods calculated using self-organising feature maps. Our method uses adaptive resonance theory (ART) providing online, unsupervised clustering to quantify the novelty of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-09 Marius Lindegaard , Hjalmar Jacob Vinje , Odin Aleksander Severinsen

In many reinforcement learning (RL) applications, augmenting the task rewards with heuristic rewards that encode human priors about how a task should be solved is crucial for achieving desirable performance. However, because such heuristics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Chi-Chang Lee , Zhang-Wei Hong , Pulkit Agrawal

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) learns a reward function to explain expert demonstrations. Modern IRL methods often use the adversarial (minimax) formulation that alternates between reward and policy optimization, which often lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Yang Chen , Menglin Zou , Jiaqi Zhang , Yitan Zhang , Junyi Yang , Gael Gendron , Libo Zhang , Jiamou Liu , Michael J. Witbrock

Large language models (LLMs) have recently advanced in reasoning when optimized with reinforcement learning (RL) under verifiable rewards. Existing methods primarily rely on outcome-based supervision to strengthen internal LLM reasoning,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Siyao Song , Cong Ma , Zhihao Cheng , Shiye Lei , Minghao Li , Ying Zeng , Huaixiao Tou , Kai Jia

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) faces significant challenges in addressing the hard-exploration problems in tasks with sparse or deceptive rewards and large state spaces. These challenges severely limit the practical application of DRL.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-03 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Ning Guo , Zhiming Zheng

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for large language models (LLMs). Current RLVR methods often overemphasize exploitation, leading to entropy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Liang Chen , Xueting Han , Qizhou Wang , Bo Han , Jing Bai , Hinrich Schutze , Kam-Fai Wong

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

We address the challenge of exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) when the agent operates in an unknown environment with sparse or no rewards. In this work, we study the maximum entropy exploration problem of two different types. The…

In reinforcement learning (RL), rewards of states are typically considered additive, and following the Markov assumption, they are $\textit{independent}$ of states visited previously. In many important applications, such as coverage…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Manish Prajapat , Mojmír Mutný , Melanie N. Zeilinger , Andreas Krause