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The infamous exploration-exploitation dilemma is one of the oldest and most important problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Deliberate and effective exploration is necessary for RL agents to succeed in most environments. However, until…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-09 Suraj Narayanan Sasikumar

Intrinsic motivation enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to explore when rewards are very sparse, where traditional exploration heuristics such as Boltzmann or e-greedy would typically fail. However, intrinsic exploration is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Philippe Morere , Fabio Ramos

In order to compute near-optimal policies with policy-gradient algorithms, it is common in practice to include intrinsic exploration terms in the learning objective. Although the effectiveness of these terms is usually justified by an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

Tasks with large state space and sparse rewards present a longstanding challenge to reinforcement learning. In these tasks, an agent needs to explore the state space efficiently until it finds a reward. To deal with this problem, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-16 Jiaheng Hu , Zizhao Wang , Peter Stone , Roberto Martin-Martin

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

Both computational and experimental material discovery bring forth the challenge of exploring multidimensional and multimodal parameter spaces, such as phase diagrams of Hamiltonians with multiple interactions, composition spaces of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-20 Arpan Biswas , Rama Vasudevan , Rohit Pant , Ichiro Takeuchi , Hiroshi Funakubo , Yongtao Liu

In recent years, a number of reinforcement learning (RL) methods have been proposed to explore complex environments which differ across episodes. In this work, we show that the effectiveness of these methods critically relies on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-06 Mikael Henaff , Roberta Raileanu , Minqi Jiang , Tim Rocktäschel

Bugs in popular distributed protocol implementations have been the source of many downtimes in popular internet services. We describe a randomized testing approach for distributed protocol implementations based on reinforcement learning.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Andrea Borgarelli , Constantin Enea , Rupak Majumdar , Srinidhi Nagendra

Exploration remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning, especially in environments where extrinsic rewards are sparse or non-existent. The recent rise of foundation models, such as CLIP, offers an opportunity to leverage…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Alain Andres , Javier Del Ser

Reinforcement learning in sparse-reward navigation environments with expensive and limited interactions is challenging and poses a need for effective exploration. Motivated by complex navigation tasks that require real-world training (when…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-13 Yijia Wang , Matthias Poloczek , Daniel R. Jiang

Researchers have integrated exploration techniques into multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms, drawing on their remarkable success in deep reinforcement learning. Nonetheless, exploration in MARL presents a more substantial…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Jian Tao , Yang Zhang , Yangkun Chen , Xiu Li

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

Exploring in environments with high-dimensional observations is hard. One promising approach for exploration is to use intrinsic rewards, which often boils down to estimating "novelty" of states, transitions, or trajectories with deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Toru Lin , Allan Jabri

We introduce Self-supervised Online Reward Shaping (SORS), which aims to improve the sample efficiency of any RL algorithm in sparse-reward environments by automatically densifying rewards. The proposed framework alternates between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Farzan Memarian , Wonjoon Goo , Rudolf Lioutikov , Scott Niekum , Ufuk Topcu

Achieving effective test-time scaling requires models to engage in In-Context Exploration -- the intrinsic ability to generate, verify, and refine multiple reasoning hypotheses within a single continuous context. Grounded in State Coverage…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Futing Wang , Jianhao Yan , Yun Luo , Ganqu Cui , Zhi Wang , Xiaoye Qu , Yue Zhang , Yu Cheng , Tao Lin

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a key approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, prevalent RL approaches like proximal policy optimization and group relative policy optimization suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jingtong Gao , Ling Pan , Yejing Wang , Rui Zhong , Chi Lu , Maolin Wang , Qingpeng Cai , Peng Jiang , Xiangyu Zhao

An effective approach to exploration in reinforcement learning is to rely on an agent's uncertainty over the optimal policy, which can yield near-optimal exploration strategies in tabular settings. However, in non-tabular settings that…

Traditional information theory provides a valuable foundation for Reinforcement Learning, particularly through representation learning and entropy maximization for agent exploration. However, existing methods primarily concentrate on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Xianghua Zeng , Hao Peng , Angsheng Li

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 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