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Reinforcement learning has shown great potential in generalizing over raw sensory data using only a single neural network for value optimization. There are several challenges in the current state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-04 Per-Arne Andersen , Morten Goodwin , Ole-Christoffer Granmo

Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and is of prime importance in sparse reward environments. However, many of the state of the art deep reinforcement learning algorithms, that rely on epsilon-greedy, fail on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-15 Navneet Madhu Kumar

By integrating dynamics models into model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods, model-based value expansion (MVE) algorithms have shown a significant advantage in sample efficiency as well as value estimation. However, these methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-12 Bo Zhou , Hongsheng Zeng , Fan Wang , Yunxiang Li , Hao Tian

One principled approach for provably efficient exploration is incorporating the upper confidence bound (UCB) into the value function as a bonus. However, UCB is specified to deal with linear and tabular settings and is incompatible with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Chenjia Bai , Lingxiao Wang , Lei Han , Jianye Hao , Animesh Garg , Peng Liu , Zhaoran Wang

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a key approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, prevalent RL approaches like proximal policy optimization and group relative policy optimization suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jingtong Gao , Ling Pan , Yejing Wang , Rui Zhong , Chi Lu , Maolin Wang , Qingpeng Cai , Peng Jiang , Xiangyu Zhao

Reward-biased maximum likelihood estimation (RBMLE) is a classic principle in the adaptive control literature for tackling explore-exploit trade-offs. This paper studies the stochastic contextual bandit problem with general bounded reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Yu-Heng Hung , Ping-Chun Hsieh

Learning complex robot behaviors through interaction requires structured exploration. Planning should target interactions with the potential to optimize long-term performance, while only reducing uncertainty where conducive to this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Tim Seyde , Wilko Schwarting , Sertac Karaman , Daniela Rus

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

Exploration is critical for deep reinforcement learning in complex environments with high-dimensional observations and sparse rewards. To address this problem, recent approaches proposed to leverage intrinsic rewards to improve exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-11 Mingqi Yuan , Bo Li , Xin Jin , Wenjun Zeng

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for those tasks where rewards from environments are sparse. A commonly used approach for exploring such environments is to introduce some "intrinsic"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Neale Ratzlaff , Qinxun Bai , Li Fuxin , Wei Xu

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

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet current RLVR methods often explore poorly, leading to premature convergence and entropy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Runpeng Dai , Linfeng Song , Haolin Liu , Zhenwen Liang , Dian Yu , Haitao Mi , Zhaopeng Tu , Rui Liu , Tong Zheng , Hongtu Zhu , Dong Yu

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Feedback (RLVF) has become a key technique for enhancing the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, its reliance on sparse, outcome based rewards, which only indicate if a final…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Ang Li , Zhihang Yuan , Yang Zhang , Shouda Liu , Yisen Wang

Reward engineering and designing an incentive reward function are non-trivial tasks to train agents in complex environments. Furthermore, an inaccurate reward function may lead to a biased behaviour which is far from an efficient and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-05-04 Saeed Tafazzol , Erfan Fathi , Mahdi Rezaei , Ehsan Asali

Learning complex robot behavior through interactions with the environment necessitates principled exploration. Effective strategies should prioritize exploring regions of the state-action space that maximize rewards, with optimistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Jasmine Bayrooti , Carl Henrik Ek , Amanda Prorok

We study reinforcement learning from human feedback in general Markov decision processes, where agents learn from trajectory-level preference comparisons. A central challenge in this setting is to design algorithms that select informative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Reda Ouhamma , Maryam Kamgarpour

Efficient exploration in reinforcement learning is a challenging problem commonly addressed through intrinsic rewards. Recent prominent approaches are based on state novelty or variants of artificial curiosity. However, directly applying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Aditya Ramesh , Louis Kirsch , Sjoerd van Steenkiste , Jürgen Schmidhuber

Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has been widely adapted due to its sample efficiency. However, existing worst-case regret analysis typically requires optimistic planning, which is not realistic in general. In contrast, motivated…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-10 Lingxiao Wang , Ping Li

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

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