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Related papers: Redeeming Intrinsic Rewards via Constrained Optimi…

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This paper investigates two fundamental problems that arise when utilizing Intrinsic Motivation (IM) for reinforcement learning in Reward-Free Pre-Training (RFPT) tasks and Exploration with Intrinsic Motivation (EIM) tasks: 1) how to design…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-15 Xiang Zheng , Xingjun Ma , Chao Shen , Cong Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a compelling way to strengthen the multi step reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, prevalent RL paradigms still lean on sparse outcome-based rewards and limited exploration,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Xuan Zhang , Ruixiao Li , Zhijian Zhou , Long Li , Yulei Qin , Ke Li , Xing Sun , Xiaoyu Tan , Chao Qu , Yuan Qi

Competitive multi-agent reinforcement learning in imperfect-information games requires agents to act under partial observability and against adversarial opponents, necessitating stochastic policies. While self-play reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Zhiyuan Fan , Gabriele Farina

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

We introduce an exploration bonus for deep reinforcement learning methods that is easy to implement and adds minimal overhead to the computation performed. The bonus is the error of a neural network predicting features of the observations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-31 Yuri Burda , Harrison Edwards , Amos Storkey , Oleg Klimov

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for those tasks where rewards from environments are sparse. A commonly used approach for exploring such environments is to introduce some "intrinsic"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Neale Ratzlaff , Qinxun Bai , Li Fuxin , Wei Xu

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) algorithms have been demonstrated to perform well on high-dimensional decision making and robotic control tasks. However, because they solely optimize for rewards, the agent tends to search the same…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-12-27 Kandai Watanabe , Mathew Strong , Omer Eldar

Exploration bonuses in reinforcement learning guide long-horizon exploration by defining custom intrinsic objectives. Several exploration objectives like count-based bonuses, pseudo-counts, and state-entropy maximization are non-stationary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-24 Roger Creus Castanyer , Joshua Romoff , Glen Berseth

Designing robust reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the presence of imperfect reward signals remains a core challenge. In practice, agents are often trained with proxy rewards that only approximate the true objective, leaving them…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Zixuan Liu , Xiaolin Sun , Zizhan Zheng

In order to provide adaptive and user-friendly solutions to robotic manipulation, it is important that the agent can learn to accomplish tasks even if they are only provided with very sparse instruction signals. To address the issues…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Siyu Dai , Wei Xu , Andreas Hofmann , Brian Williams

In many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL), performing actions requires consuming certain types of resources that are non-replenishable in each episode. Typical applications include robotic control with limited energy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Zhihai Wang , Taoxing Pan , Qi Zhou , Jie Wang

The effective training of Large Language Models (LLMs) for function calling faces a critical challenge: balancing exploration of complex reasoning paths with stable policy optimization. Standard methods like Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT)…

Multi-turn human-AI collaboration is fundamental to deploying interactive services such as adaptive tutoring, conversational recommendation, and professional consultation. However, optimizing these interactions via reinforcement learning is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Haoyu Wang , Yuxin Chen , Liang Luo , Buyun Zhang , Ellie Dingqiao Wen , Pan Li

In safety-critical domains, reinforcement learning (RL) agents must often satisfy strict, zero-cost safety constraints while accomplishing tasks. Existing model-free methods frequently either fail to achieve near-zero safety violations or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Dominik Wagner , Ankit Kanwar , Luke Ong

Solving sparse reward tasks through exploration is one of the major challenges in deep reinforcement learning, especially in three-dimensional, partially-observable environments. Critically, the algorithm proposed in this article uses a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Gabriele Libardi , Gianni De Fabritiis

Reward-free exploration is a reinforcement learning setting studied by Jin et al. (2020), who address it by running several algorithms with regret guarantees in parallel. In our work, we instead give a more natural adaptive approach for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Emilie Kaufmann , Pierre Ménard , Omar Darwiche Domingues , Anders Jonsson , Edouard Leurent , Michal Valko

Differentiable reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks like DiffRO offer a powerful approach for controllable text-to-speech (TTS), but are vulnerable to reward hacking, particularly for nuanced tasks like emotion control. The policy model…

Sound · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Cong Wang , Changfeng Gao , Yang Xiang , Zhihao Du , Keyu An , Han Zhao , Qian Chen , Xiangang Li , Yingming Gao , Ya Li

A key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) is managing the exploration-exploitation trade-off without sacrificing sample efficiency. Policy gradient (PG) methods excel in exploitation through fine-grained, gradient-based optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Zelal Su "Lain" Mustafaoglu , Keshav Pingali , Risto Miikkulainen

Recent RL research has utilized reward shaping--particularly complex shaping rewards such as intrinsic motivation (IM)--to encourage agent exploration in sparse-reward environments. While often effective, ``reward hacking'' can lead to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Grant C. Forbes , Jianxun Wang , Leonardo Villalobos-Arias , Arnav Jhala , David L. Roberts

Sparsity of rewards while applying a deep reinforcement learning method negatively affects its sample-efficiency. A viable solution to deal with the sparsity of rewards is to learn via intrinsic motivation which advocates for adding an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Jiong Li , Pratik Gajane