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Continual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) is essential for developing agents that can learn, adapt, and accumulate knowledge over time. However, a fundamental challenge persists as agents must strike a delicate balance between plasticity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Chengqi Zheng , Haiyan Yin , Jianda Chen , Terence Ng , Yew-Soon Ong , Ivor Tsang

We present Reward-Switching Policy Optimization (RSPO), a paradigm to discover diverse strategies in complex RL environments by iteratively finding novel policies that are both locally optimal and sufficiently different from existing ones.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-04 Zihan Zhou , Wei Fu , Bingliang Zhang , Yi Wu

Under sparse extrinsic reward settings, reinforcement learning has remained challenging, despite surging interests in this field. Previous attempts suggest that intrinsic reward can alleviate the issue caused by sparsity. In this article,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Zijian Gao , Kele Xu , Yuanzhao Zhai , Dawei Feng , Bo Ding , XinJun Mao , Huaimin Wang

Exploration is fundamental to reinforcement learning (RL), as it determines how effectively an agent discovers and exploits the underlying structure of its environment to achieve optimal performance. Existing exploration methods generally…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Likun Wang , Xiangteng Zhang , Yinuo Wang , Guojian Zhan , Wenxuan Wang , Haoyu Gao , Jingliang Duan , Shengbo Eben Li

The exploration \& exploitation dilemma poses significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, curiosity-based exploration methods achieved great success in tackling hard-exploration problems. However, they necessitate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Yiran Wang , Chenshu Liu , Yunfan Li , Sanae Amani , Bolei Zhou , Lin F. Yang

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 fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning, as many existing methods either lack theoretical guarantees or fall short in practical effectiveness. In this paper, we propose CAE, i.e., the Critic as an Explorer, a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-23 Yexin Li

Exploration and reward specification are fundamental and intertwined challenges for reinforcement learning. Solving sequential decision-making tasks requiring expansive exploration requires either careful design of reward functions or the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Marcel Torne , Max Balsells , Zihan Wang , Samedh Desai , Tao Chen , Pulkit Agrawal , Abhishek Gupta

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their selection of actions to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Temporal Difference (TD) Learning -- a model-free RL method -- is a leading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

Reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when the reward signal is very sparse. In these cases, naive random exploration methods essentially rely on a random walk to stumble onto a rewarding state. Recent works utilize intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-14 Hyoungseok Kim , Jaekyeom Kim , Yeonwoo Jeong , Sergey Levine , Hyun Oh Song

Two hitherto disconnected threads of research, diverse exploration (DE) and maximum entropy RL have addressed a wide range of problems facing reinforcement learning algorithms via ostensibly distinct mechanisms. In this work, we identify a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Andrew Cohen , Lei Yu , Xingye Qiao , Xiangrong Tong

Preference learning in large language models relies on reward models as proxies for human judgment. However, these models frequently exhibit preference instability, producing contradictory preference assignments in response to subtle,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Shunchang Liu , Xin Chen , Belen Martin Urcelay , Francesco Croce

Recent rapid developments in reinforcement learning algorithms have been giving us novel possibilities in many fields. However, due to their exploring property, we have to take the risk into consideration when we apply those algorithms to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Yoshihiro Okawa , Tomotake Sasaki , Hitoshi Yanami , Toru Namerikawa

DeepSeek-R1 has successfully enhanced Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning capabilities through its rule-based reward system. While it's a ''perfect'' reward system that effectively mitigates reward hacking, such reward functions are often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Chenxing Wei , Jiarui Yu , Ying Tiffany He , Hande Dong , Yao Shu , Fei Yu

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms for continuous action spaces are known to be brittle toward hyperparameters as well as \cut{being}sample inefficient. Soft Actor Critic (SAC) proposes an off-policy deep actor critic algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Patrick Nadeem Ward , Ariella Smofsky , Avishek Joey Bose

We consider the exploration problem: an agent equipped with a depth sensor must map out a previously unknown environment using as few sensor measurements as possible. We propose an approach based on supervised learning of a greedy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Louis Ly , Yen-Hsi Richard Tsai

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

Successfully navigating a complex environment to obtain a desired outcome is a difficult task, that up to recently was believed to be capable only by humans. This perception has been broken down over time, especially with the introduction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Joshua Hare

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to be often unsuccessful in environments with sparse extrinsic rewards. A possible countermeasure is to endow RL agents with an intrinsic reward function, or 'intrinsic motivation', which rewards the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Francesco Massari , Martin Biehl , Lisa Meeden , Ryota Kanai

In many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL), performing actions requires consuming certain types of resources that are non-replenishable in each episode. Typical applications include robotic control with limited energy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Zhihai Wang , Taoxing Pan , Qi Zhou , Jie Wang