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Related papers: ELDEN: Exploration via Local Dependencies

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Exploration is an extremely challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially in high dimensional state and action spaces and when only sparse rewards are available. Effective representations can indicate which components of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Giulia Vezzani , Abhishek Gupta , Lorenzo Natale , Pieter Abbeel

The challenge of developing powerful and general Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents has received increasing attention in recent years. Much of this effort has focused on the single-agent setting, in which an agent maximizes a predefined…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-21 Jiachen Yang , Ang Li , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Peter Sunehag , Edward Hughes , Hongyuan Zha

Exploration is critical for deep reinforcement learning in complex environments with high-dimensional observations and sparse rewards. To address this problem, recent approaches proposed to leverage intrinsic rewards to improve exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-11 Mingqi Yuan , Bo Li , Xin Jin , Wenjun Zeng

Learning in sparse reward settings remains a challenge in Reinforcement Learning, which is often addressed by using intrinsic rewards. One promising strategy is inspired by human curiosity, requiring the agent to learn to predict the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-02 Gino Brunner , Manuel Fritsche , Oliver Richter , Roger Wattenhofer

Exogenous state variables and rewards can slow reinforcement learning by injecting uncontrolled variation into the reward signal. This paper formalizes exogenous state variables and rewards and shows that if the reward function decomposes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 George Trimponias , Thomas G. Dietterich

Unambiguous identification of the rewards driving behaviours of entities operating in complex open-ended real-world environments is difficult, partly because goals and associated behaviours emerge endogenously and are dynamically updated as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Richard M. Bailey

Reward design is a critical part of the application of reinforcement learning, the performance of which strongly depends on how well the reward signal frames the goal of the designer and how well the signal assesses progress in reaching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Yixiang Wang , Yujing Hu , Feng Wu , Yingfeng Chen

This paper proposes \emph{Episodic and Lifelong Exploration via Maximum ENTropy} (ELEMENT), a novel, multiscale, intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning (RL) framework that is able to explore environments without using any extrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Hongming Li , Shujian Yu , Bin Liu , Jose C. Principe

In the early stages of human life, babies develop their skills by exploring different scenarios motivated by their inherent satisfaction rather than by extrinsic rewards from the environment. This behavior, referred to as intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-25 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

Intrinsic rewards can improve exploration in reinforcement learning, but the exploration process may suffer from instability caused by non-stationary reward shaping and strong dependency on hyperparameters. In this work, we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Lukas Schäfer , Filippos Christianos , Josiah P. Hanna , Stefano V. Albrecht

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

Episodic count has been widely used to design a simple yet effective intrinsic motivation for reinforcement learning with a sparse reward. However, the use of episodic count in a high-dimensional state space as well as over a long episode…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Daejin Jo , Sungwoong Kim , Daniel Wontae Nam , Taehwan Kwon , Seungeun Rho , Jongmin Kim , Donghoon Lee

Exploration is essential for reinforcement learning (RL). To face the challenges of exploration, we consider a reward-free RL framework that completely separates exploration from exploitation and brings new challenges for exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Chuheng Zhang , Yuanying Cai , Longbo Huang , Jian Li

Efficient exploration remains one of the longstanding problems of deep reinforcement learning. Instead of depending solely on extrinsic rewards from the environments, existing methods use intrinsic rewards to enhance exploration. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-09 SuMin Oh , WanSoo Kim , HyunJin Kim

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is the design of exploration strategies, especially for environments with sparse reward structures and continuous state and action spaces. Intuitively, if the reinforcement signal is very scarce,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Susan Amin , Maziar Gomrokchi , Hossein Aboutalebi , Harsh Satija , Doina Precup

Learning about many things can provide numerous benefits to a reinforcement learning system. For example, learning many auxiliary value functions, in addition to optimizing the environmental reward, appears to improve both exploration and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Cam Linke , Nadia M. Ady , Martha White , Thomas Degris , Adam White

Acquiring abilities in the absence of a task-oriented reward function is at the frontier of reinforcement learning research. This problem has been studied through the lens of empowerment, which draws a connection between option discovery…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Víctor Campos , Alexander Trott , Caiming Xiong , Richard Socher , Xavier Giro-i-Nieto , Jordi Torres

Efficient exploration in deep cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) still remains challenging in complex coordination problems. In this paper, we introduce a novel Episodic Multi-agent reinforcement learning with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Lulu Zheng , Jiarui Chen , Jianhao Wang , Jiamin He , Yujing Hu , Yingfeng Chen , Changjie Fan , Yang Gao , Chongjie Zhang

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Simone Parisi , Davide Tateo , Maximilian Hensel , Carlo D'Eramo , Jan Peters , Joni Pajarinen

Numerous past works have tackled the problem of task-driven navigation. But, how to effectively explore a new environment to enable a variety of down-stream tasks has received much less attention. In this work, we study how agents can…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-03-06 Tao Chen , Saurabh Gupta , Abhinav Gupta