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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

The human intrinsic desire to pursue knowledge, also known as curiosity, is considered essential in the process of skill acquisition. With the aid of artificial curiosity, we could equip current techniques for control, such as Reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-24 Pietro Mazzaglia , Ozan Catal , Tim Verbelen , Bart Dhoedt

We show that reinforcement learning agents that learn by surprise (surprisal) get stuck at abrupt environmental transition boundaries because these transitions are difficult to learn. We propose a counter-intuitive solution that we call…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-17 Haitao Xu , Brendan McCane , Lech Szymanski , Craig Atkinson

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), artificial agents are trained to maximize numerical rewards by performing tasks. Exploration is essential in RL because agents must discover information before exploiting it. Two rewards encouraging efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-14 Theodore Jerome Tinker , Kenji Doya , Jun Tani

We develop a general problem setting for training and testing the ability of agents to gather information efficiently. Specifically, we present a collection of tasks in which success requires searching through a partially-observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-12-09 Philip Bachman , Alessandro Sordoni , Adam Trischler

Research on exploration in reinforcement learning, as applied to Atari 2600 game-playing, has emphasized tackling difficult exploration problems such as Montezuma's Revenge (Bellemare et al., 2016). Recently, bonus-based exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-24 Adrien Ali Taïga , William Fedus , Marlos C. Machado , Aaron Courville , Marc G. Bellemare

Effective exploration in reinforcement learning requires not only tracking where an agent has been, but also understanding how the agent perceives and represents the world. To learn powerful representations, an agent should actively explore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Faisal Mohamed , Catherine Ji , Benjamin Eysenbach , Glen Berseth

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

Environments with controllable dynamics are usually understood in terms of explicit models. However, such models are not always available, but may sometimes be learned by exploring an environment. In this work, we investigate using an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Peter N. Loxley , Friedrich T. Sommer

Humans integrate multiple sensory modalities (e.g. visual and audio) to build a causal understanding of the physical world. In this work, we propose a novel type of intrinsic motivation for Reinforcement Learning (RL) that encourages the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-07-28 Chuang Gan , Xiaoyu Chen , Phillip Isola , Antonio Torralba , Joshua B. Tenenbaum

One of the bottlenecks preventing Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms (DRL) from real-world applications is how to explore the environment and collect informative transitions efficiently. The present paper describes bounded exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Ting Qiao , Henry Williams , David Valencia , Bruce MacDonald

Computer-aided design of molecules has the potential to disrupt the field of drug and material discovery. Machine learning, and deep learning, in particular, have been topics where the field has been developing at a rapid pace.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-08 Luca A. Thiede , Mario Krenn , AkshatKumar Nigam , Alan Aspuru-Guzik

One effective approach for equipping artificial agents with sensorimotor skills is to use self-exploration. To do this efficiently is critical, as time and data collection are costly. In this study, we propose an exploration mechanism that…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-18 Melisa Sener , Yukie Nagai , Erhan Oztop , Emre Ugur

Effective and intelligent exploration has been an unresolved problem for reinforcement learning. Most contemporary reinforcement learning relies on simple heuristic strategies such as $\epsilon$-greedy exploration or adding Gaussian noise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Muhammad Usama , Dong Eui Chang

We introduce a class of learning problems where the agent is presented with a series of tasks. Intuitively, if there is relation among those tasks, then the information gained during execution of one task has value for the execution of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-09-06 Christos Dimitrakakis

Multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) problems often encounter the challenge of sparse rewards. This challenge becomes even more pronounced when coordination among agents is necessary. As performance depends not only on one…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Maxime Toquebiau , Nicolas Bredeche , Faïz Benamar , Jae-Yun Jun

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is exploration, when local dithering methods such as epsilon-greedy sampling are insufficient to solve a given task. Many recent methods have proposed to intrinsically motivate an agent to seek…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-15 Riley Simmons-Edler , Ben Eisner , Daniel Yang , Anthony Bisulco , Eric Mitchell , Sebastian Seung , Daniel Lee

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as curriculum learning and Go-Explore often rely on hand-crafted heuristics, while curiosity-driven…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Georgios Sotirchos , Zlatan Ajanović , Jens Kober

We study the problem of learning exploration-exploitation strategies that effectively adapt to dynamic environments, where the task may change over time. While RNN-based policies could in principle represent such strategies, in practice…