English
Related papers

Related papers: Beyond Surprise: Improving Exploration Through Sur…

200 papers

To handle the sparsity of the extrinsic rewards in reinforcement learning, researchers have proposed intrinsic reward which enables the agent to learn the skills that might come in handy for pursuing the rewards in the future, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Chao Chen , Zijian Gao , Kele Xu , Sen Yang , Yiying Li , Bo Ding , Dawei Feng , Huaimin Wang

Exploration in complex domains is a key challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks with very sparse rewards. Recent successes in deep reinforcement learning have been achieved mostly using simple heuristic exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-07 Joshua Achiam , Shankar Sastry

The reinforcement learning (RL) research area is very active, with an important number of new contributions; especially considering the emergent field of deep RL (DRL). However a number of scientific and technical challenges still need to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-22 Arthur Aubret , Laetitia Matignon , Salima Hassas

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

We propose Strategy-aware Surprise (SuS), a novel intrinsic motivation framework that uses pre-post prediction mismatch as a novelty signal for exploration in reinforcement learning. Unlike traditional curiosity-driven methods that rely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Mark Kashirskiy , Ilya Makarov

When there exists an unlearnable source of randomness (noisy-TV) in the environment, a naively intrinsic reward driven exploring agent gets stuck at that source of randomness and fails at exploration. Intrinsic reward based on uncertainty…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Zhibo Hou , Zhiyu An , Wan Du

Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

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

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 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

Exploration algorithms for reinforcement learning typically replace or augment the reward function with an additional ``intrinsic'' reward that trains the agent to seek previously unseen states of the environment. Here, we consider an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Kevin McKee , Eric Alt , Andrew Grebenisan , Mick van Gelderen , Gary Miguel

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

Sparse reward environments are known to be challenging for reinforcement learning agents. In such environments, efficient and scalable exploration is crucial. Exploration is a means by which an agent gains information about the environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Jacob Chmura , Hasham Burhani , Xiao Qi Shi

We present a new approach for efficient exploration which leverages a low-dimensional encoding of the environment learned with a combination of model-based and model-free objectives. Our approach uses intrinsic rewards that are based on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-18 Ruo Yu Tao , Vincent François-Lavet , Joelle Pineau

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

Reinforcement learning can solve decision-making problems and train an agent to behave in an environment according to a predesigned reward function. However, such an approach becomes very problematic if the reward is too sparse and so the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Matej Pecháč , Michal Chovanec , Igor Farkaš

Intrinsic rewards have been increasingly used to mitigate the sparse reward problem in single-agent reinforcement learning. These intrinsic rewards encourage the agent to look for novel experiences, guiding the agent to explore the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Roben Delos Reyes , Kyunghwan Son , Jinhwan Jung , Wan Ju Kang , Yung Yi

Efficient exploration is a long-standing problem in reinforcement learning since extrinsic rewards are usually sparse or missing. A popular solution to this issue is to feed an agent with novelty signals as intrinsic rewards. In this work,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Jianren Wang , Ziwen Zhuang , Hang Zhao

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

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong
‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›