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Related papers: ELDEN: Exploration via Local Dependencies

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One of the remaining challenges in reinforcement learning is to develop agents that can generalise to novel scenarios they might encounter once deployed. This challenge is often framed in a multi-task setting where agents train on a fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Max Weltevrede , Felix Kaubek , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Wendelin Böhmer

Although there are many approaches to implement intrinsically motivated artificial agents, the combined usage of multiple intrinsic drives remains still a relatively unexplored research area. Specifically, we hypothesize that a mechanism…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-19 Ildefons Magrans de Abril , Ryota Kanai

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

What is a good exploration strategy for an agent that interacts with an environment in the absence of external rewards? Ideally, we would like to get a policy driving towards a uniform state-action visitation (highly exploring) in a minimum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-20 Mirco Mutti , Marcello Restelli

In multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), effective exploration is critical, especially in sparse reward environments. Although introducing global intrinsic rewards can foster exploration in such settings, it often complicates credit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Xinran Li , Zifan Liu , Shibo Chen , Jun Zhang

This paper explores the combination of two intrinsic motivation strategies to improve the efficiency of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in environments with extreme sparse rewards, where traditional learning struggles due to infrequent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 André Quadros , Cassio Silva , Ronnie Alves

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

In this paper we introduce a new unsupervised reinforcement learning method for discovering the set of intrinsic options available to an agent. This set is learned by maximizing the number of different states an agent can reliably reach, as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-23 Karol Gregor , Danilo Jimenez Rezende , Daan Wierstra

Exploration in high-dimensional, continuous spaces with sparse rewards is an open problem in reinforcement learning. Artificial curiosity algorithms address this by creating rewards that lead to exploration. Given a reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Alexander Nedergaard , Matthew Cook

To rapidly learn a new task, it is often essential for agents to explore efficiently -- especially when performance matters from the first timestep. One way to learn such behaviour is via meta-learning. Many existing methods however rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-11 Luisa Zintgraf , Leo Feng , Cong Lu , Maximilian Igl , Kristian Hartikainen , Katja Hofmann , Shimon Whiteson

Reinforcement Learning has suffered from poor reward specification, and issues for reward hacking even in simple enough domains. Preference Based Reinforcement Learning attempts to solve the issue by utilizing binary feedbacks on queried…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-20 Mudit Verma , Subbarao Kambhampati

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

Dealing with environments with sparse rewards has always been crucial for systems developed to operate in autonomous open-ended learning settings. Intrinsic Motivations could be an effective way to help Deep Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Gianluca Maselli , Vieri Giuliano Santucci

Reinforcement learning involves agents interacting with an environment to complete tasks. When rewards provided by the environment are sparse, agents may not receive immediate feedback on the quality of actions that they take, thereby…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Baicen Xiao , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Radha Poovendran

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

Exploration in sparse reward reinforcement learning remains an open challenge. Many state-of-the-art methods use intrinsic motivation to complement the sparse extrinsic reward signal, giving the agent more opportunities to receive feedback…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-24 Jingwei Zhang , Niklas Wetzel , Nicolai Dorka , Joschka Boedecker , Wolfram Burgard

The explore{exploit dilemma is one of the central challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Bayesian RL solves the dilemma by providing the agent with information in the form of a prior distribution over environments; however, full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-19 Jonathan Sorg , Satinder Singh , Richard L. Lewis

Imitation learning is an effective alternative approach to learn a policy when the reward function is sparse. In this paper, we consider a challenging setting where an agent and an expert use different actions from each other. We assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Konrad Zolna , Negar Rostamzadeh , Yoshua Bengio , Sungjin Ahn , Pedro O. Pinheiro

Efficient exploration in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is a challenging problem when receiving only a team reward, especially in environments with sparse rewards. A powerful method to mitigate this issue involves crafting dense…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Xuefei Wu , Xiao Yin , Yuanyang Zhu , Chunlin Chen

Model-based reinforcement learning methods typically learn models for high-dimensional state spaces by aiming to reconstruct and predict the original observations. However, drawing inspiration from model-free reinforcement learning, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-10 Aaron Havens , Yi Ouyang , Prabhat Nagarajan , Yasuhiro Fujita