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Fine-tuning a pre-trained generative model has demonstrated good performance in generating promising drug molecules. The fine-tuning task is often formulated as a reinforcement learning problem, where previous methods efficiently learn to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Hampus Gummesson Svensson , Christian Tyrchan , Ola Engkvist , Morteza Haghir Chehreghani

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been widely used to solve tasks where the environment consistently provides a dense reward value. However, in real-world scenarios, rewards can often be poorly defined or sparse. Auxiliary signals are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-01 David Valencia , Henry Williams , Yuning Xing , Trevor Gee , Minas Liarokapis , Bruce A. MacDonald

Intrinsic reward shaping has emerged as a prevalent approach to solving hard-exploration and sparse-rewards environments in reinforcement learning (RL). While single intrinsic rewards, such as curiosity-driven or novelty-based methods, have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Mingqi Yuan , Bo Li , Xin Jin , Wenjun Zeng

Maximum entropy reinforcement learning integrates exploration into policy learning by providing additional intrinsic rewards proportional to the entropy of some distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel approach in which the intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

The sparsity of extrinsic rewards poses a serious challenge for reinforcement learning (RL). Currently, many efforts have been made on curiosity which can provide a representative intrinsic reward for effective exploration. However, the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Zijian Gao , YiYing Li , Kele Xu , Yuanzhao Zhai , Dawei Feng , Bo Ding , XinJun Mao , Huaimin Wang

With reinforcement learning, an agent could learn complex behaviors from high-level abstractions of the task. However, exploration and reward shaping remained challenging for existing methods, especially in scenarios where the extrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Jie Chen , Wenjun Xu

Efficient exploration remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning, especially when an environment contains large state spaces, deceptive local optima, or sparse rewards. To tackle this problem, we present a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Zhang-Wei Hong , Tzu-Yun Shann , Shih-Yang Su , Yi-Hsiang Chang , Chun-Yi Lee

Our work is a simple extension of the paper "Exploration by Random Network Distillation". More in detail, we show how to efficiently combine Intrinsic Rewards with Experience Replay in order to achieve more efficient and robust exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Francesco Sovrano

The success of reinforcement learning in typical settings is predicated on Markovian assumptions on the reward signal by which an agent learns optimal policies. In recent years, the use of reward machines has relaxed this assumption by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Taylor Dohmen , Noah Topper , George Atia , Andre Beckus , Ashutosh Trivedi , Alvaro Velasquez

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a critical technique for training large language models. However, conventional reward models based on the Bradley-Terry model (BTRM) often suffer from overconfidence when faced with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Wangtao Sun , Xiang Cheng , Xing Yu , Haotian Xu , Zhao Yang , Shizhu He , Jun Zhao , Kang Liu

Exploration remains a critical challenge in online reinforcement learning, as an agent must effectively explore unknown environments to achieve high returns. Currently, the main exploration algorithms are primarily count-based methods and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Zhirui Fang , Kai Yang , Jian Tao , Jiafei Lyu , Lusong Li , Li Shen , Xiu Li

Reinforcement learning optimizes policies for expected cumulative reward. Need the supervision be so narrow? Reward is delayed and sparse for many tasks, making it a difficult and impoverished signal for end-to-end optimization. To augment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-10 Evan Shelhamer , Parsa Mahmoudieh , Max Argus , Trevor Darrell

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

Suspense is a crucial ingredient of narrative fiction, engaging readers and making stories compelling. While there is a vast theoretical literature on suspense, it is computationally not well understood. We compare two ways for modelling…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-01 David Wilmot , Frank Keller

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks where extrinsic rewards from environments are sparse or even totally disregarded. Significant advances based on intrinsic motivation show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Chenjia Bai , Peng Liu , Kaiyu Liu , Lingxiao Wang , Yingnan Zhao , Lei Han

Current approaches to novelty or anomaly detection are based on deep neural networks. Despite their effectiveness, neural networks are also vulnerable to imperceptible deformations of the input data. This is a serious issue in critical…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Ranya Almohsen , Shivang Patel , Donald A. Adjeroh , Gianfranco Doretto

Intelligent agents must pursue their goals in complex environments with partial information and often limited computational capacity. Reinforcement learning methods have achieved great success by creating agents that optimize engineered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Alejandro Daniel Noel , Charel van Hoof , Beren Millidge

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

Recently there has been a proliferation of intrinsic motivation (IM) reward-shaping methods to learn in complex and sparse-reward environments. These methods can often inadvertently change the set of optimal policies in an environment,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Grant C. Forbes , Leonardo Villalobos-Arias , Jianxun Wang , Arnav Jhala , David L. Roberts

Currently, explosive increase of smartphones with powerful built-in sensors such as GPS, accelerometers, gyroscopes and cameras has made the design of crowdsensing applications possible, which create a new interface between human beings and…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2019-01-04 Yufeng Zhan , Yuanqing Xia , Jiang Zhang , Ting Li , Yu Wang