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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

This paper proposes an exploration method for deep reinforcement learning based on parameter space noise. Recent studies have experimentally shown that parameter space noise results in better exploration than the commonly used action space…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-09-28 Izumi Karino , Kazutoshi Tanaka , Ryuma Niiyama , Yasuo Kuniyoshi

Despite the close connection between exploration and sample efficiency, most state of the art reinforcement learning algorithms include no considerations for exploration beyond maximizing the entropy of the policy. In this work we address…

Reinforcement learning agents need exploratory behaviors to escape from local optima. These behaviors may include both immediate dithering perturbation and temporally consistent exploration. To achieve these, a stochastic policy model that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Sirui Xie , Junning Huang , Lanxin Lei , Chunxiao Liu , Zheng Ma , Wei Zhang , Liang Lin

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks where extrinsic rewards from environments are sparse or even totally disregarded. Significant advances based on intrinsic motivation show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Chenjia Bai , Peng Liu , Kaiyu Liu , Lingxiao Wang , Yingnan Zhao , Lei Han

All reinforcement learning algorithms must handle the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Many state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning methods use noise in the action selection, such as Gaussian noise in policy gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-05 Trevor Barron , Oliver Obst , Heni Ben Amor

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning as an agent relies on trial and error to learn an optimal policy. However, when rewards are sparse, naive exploration strategies, like noise injection, are often insufficient. Intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Minjae Cho , Huy Trong Tran

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

In actor-critic-based reinforcement learning algorithms such as Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic policy gradient (TD3), insufficient exploration of the spatial space can result in suboptimal policies when controlling 7-DOF robotic arms. To…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Wen-Han Hsieh , Jen-Yuan Chang

Exploration in environments with continuous control and sparse rewards remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, surprise has been used as an intrinsic reward that encourages systematic and efficient exploration. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-01 Haitao Xu , Brendan McCane , Lech Szymanski

In recent years Landmark Complexes have been successfully employed for localization-free and metric-free autonomous exploration using a group of sensing-limited and communication-limited robots in a GPS-denied environment. To ensure rapid…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Xiatao Sun , Yuwei Wu , Subhrajit Bhattacharya , Vijay Kumar

Scalable and effective exploration remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). While there are methods with optimality guarantees in the setting of discrete state and action spaces, these methods cannot be applied in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-30 Rein Houthooft , Xi Chen , Yan Duan , John Schulman , Filip De Turck , Pieter Abbeel

In this work, we address the challenge of data-efficient exploration in reinforcement learning by examining existing principled, information-theoretic approaches to intrinsic motivation. Specifically, we focus on a class of exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Alberto Caron , Chris Hicks , Vasilios Mavroudis

Exploration algorithms for reinforcement learning typically replace or augment the reward function with an additional ``intrinsic'' reward that trains the agent to seek previously unseen states of the environment. Here, we consider an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Kevin McKee , Eric Alt , Andrew Grebenisan , Mick van Gelderen , Gary Miguel

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

Deep learning has achieved remarkable successes in solving challenging reinforcement learning (RL) problems when dense reward function is provided. However, in sparse reward environment it still often suffers from the need to carefully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Hao Liu , Alexander Trott , Richard Socher , Caiming Xiong

Ensuring the safety of environmental exploration is a critical problem in reinforcement learning (RL). While limiting exploration to a feasible zone has become widely accepted as a way to ensure safety, key questions remain unresolved: what…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Yujie Yang , Zhilong Zheng , Shengbo Eben Li

Solving tasks with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in reinforcement learning. In the single-agent setting, this challenge is addressed by introducing intrinsic rewards that motivate agents to explore unseen regions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

Small language models (SLMs) struggle with complex reasoning because exploration is expensive under tight compute budgets. We introduce Semantic Diversity-Exploration-Exploitation (SD-E$^2$), a reinforcement learning framework that makes…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Kshitij Mishra , Nils Lukas , Salem Lahlou