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We present a new computing model for intrinsic rewards in reinforcement learning that addresses the limitations of existing surprise-driven explorations. The reward is the novelty of the surprise rather than the surprise norm. We estimate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-01 Hung Le , Kien Do , Dung Nguyen , Svetha Venkatesh

Unsupervised reinforcement learning aims at learning a generalist policy in a reward-free manner for fast adaptation to downstream tasks. Most of the existing methods propose to provide an intrinsic reward based on surprise. Maximizing or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Andrew Zhao , Matthieu Gaetan Lin , Yangguang Li , Yong-Jin Liu , Gao Huang

Exploration in complex domains is a key challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks with very sparse rewards. Recent successes in deep reinforcement learning have been achieved mostly using simple heuristic exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-07 Joshua Achiam , Shankar Sastry

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

A community of researchers appears to think that a machine can be surprised and have introduced various surprise measures, principally the Shannon Surprise and the Bayesian Surprise. The questions of what constitutes a surprise and how to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Yinsong Wang , Quan Zeng , Xiao Liu , Yu Ding

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

Both entropy-minimizing and entropy-maximizing (curiosity) objectives for unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) have been shown to be effective in different environments, depending on the environment's level of natural entropy. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Adriana Hugessen , Roger Creus Castanyer , Faisal Mohamed , Glen Berseth

Reinforcement learning (RL) systems typically optimize scalar reward functions that assume precise and reliable evaluation of outcomes. However, real-world objectives--especially those derived from human preferences--are often uncertain,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Disha Singha

Reinforcement learning can solve decision-making problems and train an agent to behave in an environment according to a predesigned reward function. However, such an approach becomes very problematic if the reward is too sparse and so the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Matej Pecháč , Michal Chovanec , Igor Farkaš

Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning, particularly in environments where external rewards are sparse. Here we focus on exploration with intrinsic rewards, where the agent transiently augments the external rewards with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Changmin Yu , Neil Burgess , Maneesh Sahani , Samuel J. Gershman

Agentic search enables LLMs to solve complex multi-hop questions through iterative reasoning and external search. Despite the effectiveness, these systems often suffer from a critical limitation in practice: agents fail to recognize their…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yunbo Tang , Chengyi Yang , Shiyu Liu , Zhishang Xiang , Zerui Chen , Qinggang Zhang , Jinsong Su

In environments with sparse rewards, finding a good inductive bias for exploration is crucial to the agent's success. However, there are two competing goals: novelty search and systematic exploration. While existing approaches such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Stefan Sylvius Wagner , Peter Arndt , Jan Robine , Stefan Harmeling

Surprise describes a range of phenomena from unexpected events to behavioral responses. We propose a measure of surprise and use it for surprise-driven learning. Our surprise measure takes into account data likelihood as well as the degree…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-03 Mohammadjavad Faraji , Kerstin Preuschoff , Wulfram Gerstner

Exploration in sparse reward reinforcement learning remains an open challenge. Many state-of-the-art methods use intrinsic motivation to complement the sparse extrinsic reward signal, giving the agent more opportunities to receive feedback…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-24 Jingwei Zhang , Niklas Wetzel , Nicolai Dorka , Joschka Boedecker , Wolfram Burgard

Reinforcement learning algorithms rely on carefully engineering environment rewards that are extrinsic to the agent. However, annotating each environment with hand-designed, dense rewards is not scalable, motivating the need for developing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-14 Yuri Burda , Harri Edwards , Deepak Pathak , Amos Storkey , Trevor Darrell , Alexei A. Efros

Intrinsic rewards have been increasingly used to mitigate the sparse reward problem in single-agent reinforcement learning. These intrinsic rewards encourage the agent to look for novel experiences, guiding the agent to explore the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Roben Delos Reyes , Kyunghwan Son , Jinhwan Jung , Wan Ju Kang , Yung Yi

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for training reasoning-oriented models by leveraging rule-based reward signals. However, RL training typically tends to improve single-sample success rates (i.e., Pass@1) while…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yifu Huo , Chenglong Wang , Ziming Zhu , Shunjie Xing , Peinan Feng , Tongran Liu , Qiaozhi He , Tianhua Zhou , Xiaojia Chang , Jingbo Zhu , Zhengtao Yu , Tong Xiao

We study the role of intrinsic motivation as an exploration bias for reinforcement learning in sparse-reward synergistic tasks, which are tasks where multiple agents must work together to achieve a goal they could not individually. Our key…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-14 Rohan Chitnis , Shubham Tulsiani , Saurabh Gupta , Abhinav Gupta

Continual learning, one's ability to adapt to a sequence of tasks without forgetting previously acquired knowledge, remains a major challenge in machine learning and a key gap between artificial and human intelligence. While regularisation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Hugo Hazard , Zafeirios Fountas , Martin A. Benfeghoul , Adnan Oomerjee , Jun Wang , Haitham Bou-Ammar

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
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