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Related papers: Curiosity-driven Exploration in Sparse-reward Mult…

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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

Sparse-reward domains are challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms since significant exploration is needed before encountering reward for the first time. Hierarchical reinforcement learning can facilitate exploration by reducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-13 Lorenzo Steccanella , Simone Totaro , Damien Allonsius , Anders Jonsson

Improving sample efficiency is a key challenge in reinforcement learning, especially in environments with large state spaces and sparse rewards. In literature, this is resolved either through the use of auxiliary tasks (subgoals) or through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Durgesh Kalwar , Omkar Shelke , Somjit Nath , Hardik Meisheri , Harshad Khadilkar

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to behave so as to maximise the sum of a suitable scalar function of state: the reward. These rewards are typically given and immutable. In this paper, we instead consider the proposition…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Zeyu Zheng , Junhyuk Oh , Matteo Hessel , Zhongwen Xu , Manuel Kroiss , Hado van Hasselt , David Silver , Satinder Singh

Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for unlocking reasoning capabilities in language models. However, relying on sparse rewards makes this process highly sample-inefficient, as models must navigate vast search spaces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Ilia Mahrooghi , Aryo Lotfi , Emmanuel Abbe

Imitation learning in a high-dimensional environment is challenging. Most inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) methods fail to outperform the demonstrator in such a high-dimensional environment, e.g., Atari domain. To address this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-14 Xingrui Yu , Yueming Lyu , Ivor W. Tsang

Sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) can model a wide range of highly complex tasks. Solving sparse-reward tasks is RL's core premise, requiring efficient exploration coupled with long-horizon credit assignment, and overcoming these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Leander Diaz-Bone , Marco Bagatella , Jonas Hübotter , Andreas Krause

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

Efficient exploration for automatic subgoal discovery is a challenging problem in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL). In this paper, we show that intrinsic motivation learning increases the efficiency of exploration, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-25 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

Exploration is a prerequisite for learning useful behaviors in sparse-reward, long-horizon tasks, particularly within 3D environments. Curiosity-driven reinforcement learning addresses this via intrinsic rewards derived from the mismatch…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Lily Goli , Justin Kerr , Daniele Reda , Alec Jacobson , Andrea Tagliasacchi , Angjoo Kanazawa

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

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

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

The ability to explore efficiently and effectively is a central challenge of reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider exploration through the lens of information theory. Specifically, we cast exploration as a problem of maximizing…

This paper explores an intrinsic motivation for mutual awareness, hypothesizing that humans possess a fundamental drive to understand and to be understood even in the absence of extrinsic rewards. Through simulations of the perceptual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-11 Chrisantha Fernando , Dylan Banarse , Simon Osindero

Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Simone Parisi , Alireza Kazemipour , Michael Bowling

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

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) under sparse rewards remains fundamentally challenging because agents often fail to concentrate their influence, leading to insufficiently coordinated exploration. To address this, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yisak Park , Sunwoo Lee , Seungyul Han

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Deep Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) have achieved significant successes across a wide range of domains, including game AI, autonomous vehicles, robotics, and so on. However, DRL and deep MARL…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-03 Jianye Hao , Tianpei Yang , Hongyao Tang , Chenjia Bai , Jinyi Liu , Zhaopeng Meng , Peng Liu , Zhen Wang

Numerous heuristics and advanced approaches have been proposed for exploration in different settings for deep reinforcement learning. Noise-based exploration generally fares well with dense-shaped rewards and bonus-based exploration with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Sebastian Griesbach , Carlo D'Eramo