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Related papers: CIM: Constrained Intrinsic Motivation for Sparse-R…

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Although most theories posit that natural behavior can be explained as maximizing some form of extrinsic reward, often called utility, some behaviors appear to be reward independent. For instance, spontaneous motor babbling in human…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2026-01-16 Rubén Moreno-Bote , Ralf Haefner , Jordi Galiano-Landeira , Tianming Yang , Pedro Maldonado

This paper studies the coupling of internally guided learning and social interaction, and more specifically the improvement owing to demonstrations of the learning by intrinsic motivation. We present Socially Guided Intrinsic Motivation by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-01 Sao Mai Nguyen , Adrien Baranes , Pierre-Yves Oudeyer

In reinforcement learning, an agent learns to reach a set of goals by means of an external reward signal. In the natural world, intelligent organisms learn from internal drives, bypassing the need for external signals, which is beneficial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Rui Zhao , Yang Gao , Pieter Abbeel , Volker Tresp , Wei Xu

Under sparse extrinsic reward settings, reinforcement learning has remained challenging, despite surging interests in this field. Previous attempts suggest that intrinsic reward can alleviate the issue caused by sparsity. In this article,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Zijian Gao , Kele Xu , Yuanzhao Zhai , Dawei Feng , Bo Ding , XinJun Mao , Huaimin Wang

In vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, it is prevalent to assign auxiliary tasks with a surrogate self-supervised loss so as to obtain more semantic representations and improve sample efficiency. However, abundant information in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-16 Yue Zhao , Chenzhuang Du , Hang Zhao , Tiejun Li

While unsupervised skill discovery has shown promise in autonomously acquiring behavioral primitives, there is still a large methodological disconnect between task-agnostic skill pretraining and downstream, task-aware finetuning. We present…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Ademi Adeniji , Amber Xie , Pieter Abbeel

Positive affect has been linked to increased interest, curiosity and satisfaction in human learning. In reinforcement learning, extrinsic rewards are often sparse and difficult to define, intrinsically motivated learning can help address…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Dean Zadok , Daniel McDuff , Ashish Kapoor

In environments with sparse rewards, finding a good inductive bias for exploration is crucial to the agent's success. However, there are two competing goals: novelty search and systematic exploration. While existing approaches such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Stefan Sylvius Wagner , Peter Arndt , Jan Robine , Stefan Harmeling

Extrinsic rewards can effectively guide reinforcement learning (RL) agents in specific tasks. However, extrinsic rewards frequently fall short in complex environments due to the significant human effort needed for their design and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Mingqi Yuan , Roger Creus Castanyer , Bo Li , Xin Jin , Wenjun Zeng , Glen Berseth

In this paper, we revisit variational intrinsic control (VIC), an unsupervised reinforcement learning method for finding the largest set of intrinsic options available to an agent. In the original work by Gregor et al. (2016), two VIC…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Taehwan Kwon

Exploration is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), and its effectiveness is a deciding factor in the performance of RL algorithms, especially when facing sparse extrinsic rewards. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Shanchuan Wan , Yujin Tang , Yingtao Tian , Tomoyuki Kaneko

Reinforcement learning agents learn from rewards, but humans can uniquely assign value to novel, abstract outcomes in a goal-dependent manner. However, this flexibility is cognitively costly, making learning less efficient. Here, we propose…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-09-11 Gaia Molinaro , Anne G. E. Collins

Humans and animals explore their environment and acquire useful skills even in the absence of clear goals, exhibiting intrinsic motivation. The study of intrinsic motivation in artificial agents is concerned with the following question:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Nicholas Rhinehart , Jenny Wang , Glen Berseth , John D. Co-Reyes , Danijar Hafner , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

We extend the framework of efficient coding, which has been used to model the development of sensory processing in isolation, to model the development of the perception/action cycle. Our extension combines sparse coding and reinforcement…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2014-02-26 Chong Zhang , Yu Zhao , Jochen Triesch , Bertram E. Shi

A key challenge for reinforcement learning (RL) consists of learning in environments with sparse extrinsic rewards. In contrast to current RL methods, humans are able to learn new skills with little or no reward by using various forms of…

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

Intrinsic rewards for exploration in reinforcement learning condition on different contexts: lifelong rewards score each transition against accumulated experience but ignore within-rollout redundancy; episodic rewards penalize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Tim Joseph , Marcus Fechner , Philipp Stegmaier , Karam Daaboul , J. Marius Zöllner

Model-based reinforcement learning is a promising learning strategy for practical robotic applications due to its improved data-efficiency versus model-free counterparts. However, current state-of-the-art model-based methods rely on shaped…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-10 Robert McCarthy , Qiang Wang , Stephen J. Redmond

Reinforcement Learning faces an important challenge in partial observable environments that has long-term dependencies. In order to learn in an ambiguous environment, an agent has to keep previous perceptions in a memory. Earlier memory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Alper Demir

Large Language Models (LLMs) are able to improve their responses when instructed to do so, a capability known as self-correction. When instructions provide only the task's goal without specific details about potential issues in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Guangliang Liu , Haitao Mao , Bochuan Cao , Zhiyu Xue , Xitong Zhang , Rongrong Wang , Jiliang Tang , Kristen Johnson