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Related papers: ELEMENT: Episodic and Lifelong Exploration via Max…

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This paper studies reward-agnostic exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) -- a scenario where the learner is unware of the reward functions during the exploration stage -- and designs an algorithm that improves over the state of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Gen Li , Yuling Yan , Yuxin Chen , Jianqing Fan

Exploration in sparse reward environments remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning, particularly in Contextual Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs), where environments differ across episodes. Existing episodic intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Yuhua Jiang , Qihan Liu , Yiqin Yang , Xiaoteng Ma , Dianyu Zhong , Hao Hu , Jun Yang , Bin Liang , Bo Xu , Chongjie Zhang , Qianchuan Zhao

Recent trends in Reinforcement Learning (RL) highlight the need for agents to learn from reward-free interactions and alternative supervision signals, such as unlabeled or incomplete demonstrations, rather than relying solely on explicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Elias Malomgré , Pieter Simoens

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) require guarantees that the agent will perform well in the face of disturbances to the dynamics or reward function. In this paper, we prove theoretically that maximum entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-06 Benjamin Eysenbach , Sergey Levine

Reinforcement learning has become the central approach for language models (LMs) to learn from environmental reward or feedback. In practice, the environmental feedback is usually sparse and delayed. Learning from such signals is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Taiwei Shi , Sihao Chen , Bowen Jiang , Linxin Song , Longqi Yang , Jieyu Zhao

Modern Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms require estimates of the maximal Q-value, which are difficult to compute in continuous domains with an infinite number of possible actions. In this work, we introduce a new update rule for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Divyansh Garg , Joey Hejna , Matthieu Geist , Stefano Ermon

Much of the current work on reinforcement learning studies episodic settings, where the agent is reset between trials to an initial state distribution, often with well-shaped reward functions. Non-episodic settings, where the agent must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 John D. Co-Reyes , Suvansh Sanjeev , Glen Berseth , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine

Maximum entropy has become a mainstream off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) framework for balancing exploitation and exploration. However, two bottlenecks still limit further performance improvement: (1) non-stationary Q-value estimation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Guojian Zhan , Likun Wang , Pengcheng Wang , Feihong Zhang , Jingliang Duan , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Shengbo Eben Li

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically struggle in the absence of a dense, well-shaped reward function. Intrinsically motivated exploration methods address this limitation by rewarding agents for visiting novel states or transitions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-18 Yuqing Du , Olivia Watkins , Zihan Wang , Cédric Colas , Trevor Darrell , Pieter Abbeel , Abhishek Gupta , Jacob Andreas

Reinforcement Learning (RL) heavily relies on the careful design of the reward function. However, accurately assigning rewards to each state-action pair in Long-Term Reinforcement Learning (LTRL) tasks remains a significant challenge. As a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Qi Ju , Falin Hei , Zhemei Fang , Yunfeng Luo

Exploration of indoor environments has recently experienced a significant interest, also thanks to the introduction of deep neural agents built in a hierarchical fashion and trained with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) on simulated…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) models have continually evolved to navigate the exploration - exploitation trade-off in uncertain Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In this study, I leverage the principles of stochastic thermodynamics and system…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Peeyush Kumar

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) algorithms have been demonstrated to perform well on high-dimensional decision making and robotic control tasks. However, because they solely optimize for rewards, the agent tends to search the same…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-12-27 Kandai Watanabe , Mathew Strong , Omer Eldar

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 with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a central approach for improving the reasoning ability of large language models. Recent work studies RLVR through token entropy, arguing that high-entropy tokens drive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Xinzhu Chen , Xuesheng Li , Zhongxiang Sun , Weijie Yu

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

A central capability of a long-lived reinforcement learning (RL) agent is to incrementally adapt its behavior as its environment changes, and to incrementally build upon previous experiences to facilitate future learning in real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Zhi Wang , Chunlin Chen , Daoyi Dong

Efficient exploration remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, serving as a useful pretraining objective for data collection, particularly when an external reward function is unavailable. A principled formulation of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Jacob Adamczyk , Adam Kamoski , Rahul V. Kulkarni

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

In the past decades, we have witnessed significant progress in the domain of autonomous driving. Advanced techniques based on optimization and reinforcement learning (RL) become increasingly powerful at solving the forward problem: given…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Zheng Wu , Liting Sun , Wei Zhan , Chenyu Yang , Masayoshi Tomizuka