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Sparse reward environments are known to be challenging for reinforcement learning agents. In such environments, efficient and scalable exploration is crucial. Exploration is a means by which an agent gains information about the environment.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Jacob Chmura , Hasham Burhani , Xiao Qi Shi

Two key challenges within Reinforcement Learning involve improving (a) agent learning within environments with sparse extrinsic rewards and (b) the explainability of agent actions. We describe a curious subgoal focused agent to address both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Connor van Rossum , Candice Feinberg , Adam Abu Shumays , Kyle Baxter , Benedek Bartha

Intrinsically motivated goal exploration processes enable agents to autonomously sample goals to explore efficiently complex environments with high-dimensional continuous actions. They have been applied successfully to real world robots to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Adrien Laversanne-Finot , Alexandre Péré , Pierre-Yves Oudeyer

Causal reasoning has been an indispensable capability for humans and other intelligent animals to interact with the physical world. In this work, we propose to endow an artificial agent with the capability of causal reasoning for completing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-07 Suraj Nair , Yuke Zhu , Silvio Savarese , Li Fei-Fei

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

The paper focuses on identifying the causes of student performance to provide personalized recommendations for improving pass rates. We introduce the need to move beyond predictive models and instead identify causal relationships. We…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Bevan I. Smith

Model-based next state prediction and state value prediction are slow to converge. To address these challenges, we do the following: i) Instead of a neural network, we do model-based planning using a parallel memory retrieval system (which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-02 John Chong Min Tan , Mehul Motani

Causal discovery aims to learn causal relationships between variables from targeted data, making it a fundamental task in machine learning. However, causal discovery algorithms often rely on unverifiable causal assumptions, which are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Huiyang Yi , Yanyan He , Duxin Chen , Mingyu Kang , He Wang , Wenwu Yu

Causal reasoning is increasingly used in Reinforcement Learning (RL) to improve the learning process in several dimensions: efficacy of learned policies, efficiency of convergence, generalisation capabilities, safety and interpretability of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Giovanni Briglia , Stefano Mariani , Franco Zambonelli

Collaborative multi-agent exploration of unknown environments is crucial for search and rescue operations. Effective real-world deployment must address challenges such as limited inter-agent communication and static and dynamic obstacles.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Gabriele Calzolari , Vidya Sumathy , Christoforos Kanellakis , George Nikolakopoulos

In the sequential decision making setting, an agent aims to achieve systematic generalization over a large, possibly infinite, set of environments. Such environments are modeled as discrete Markov decision processes with both states and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-31 Mirco Mutti , Riccardo De Santi , Emanuele Rossi , Juan Felipe Calderon , Michael Bronstein , Marcello Restelli

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

A hallmark of life on Earth is the ability of agents to exert causal power and be drivers of subsequent events. This is key to cognition at all scales. Causal emergence, measuring the degree to which an agent exerts unique predictive power…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Federico Pigozzi , Michael Levin

General intelligence requires quick adaption across tasks. While existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods have made progress in generalization, they typically assume only distribution changes between source and target domains. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Yupei Yang , Biwei Huang , Fan Feng , Xinyue Wang , Shikui Tu , Lei Xu

The capability to widely sample the state and action spaces is a key ingredient toward building effective reinforcement learning algorithms. The variational optimization principles exposed in this paper emphasize the importance of an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Emmanuel Daucé

Building generally capable agents is a grand challenge for deep reinforcement learning (RL). To approach this challenge practically, we outline two key desiderata: 1) to facilitate generalization, exploration should be task agnostic; 2) to…

One of the gnarliest challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) is exploration that scales to vast domains, where novelty-, or coverage-seeking behaviour falls short. Goal-directed, purposeful behaviours are able to overcome this, but rely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Akhil Bagaria , Ray Jiang , Ramana Kumar , Tom Schaul

When learning a task as a team, some agents in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) may fail to understand their true impact in the performance of the team. Such agents end up learning sub-optimal policies, demonstrating undesired lazy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Rafael Pina , Varuna De Silva , Corentin Artaud

Current Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods often suffer from sample-inefficiency, resulting from blind exploration strategies that neglect causal relationships among states, actions, and rewards. Although recent causal approaches aim to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Hongye Cao , Fan Feng , Tianpei Yang , Jing Huo , Yang Gao

Causal discovery, i.e., inferring underlying causal relationships from observational data, is highly challenging for AI systems. In a time series modeling context, traditional causal discovery methods mainly consider constrained scenarios…