Related papers: Maximum-Entropy Exploration with Future State-Acti…
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…
In a reward-free environment, what is a suitable intrinsic objective for an agent to pursue so that it can learn an optimal task-agnostic exploration policy? In this paper, we argue that the entropy of the state distribution induced by…
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…
What goals should a multi-goal reinforcement learning agent pursue during training in long-horizon tasks? When the desired (test time) goal distribution is too distant to offer a useful learning signal, we argue that the agent should not…
Efficient exploration remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, serving as a useful pretraining objective for data collection, particularly when an external reward function is unavailable. A principled formulation of the…
While most approaches to the problem of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) focus on estimating a reward function that best explains an expert agent's policy or demonstrated behavior on a control task, it is often the case that such…
The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to behave so as to maximise the sum of a suitable scalar function of state: the reward. These rewards are typically given and immutable. In this paper, we instead consider the proposition…
Positive affect has been linked to increased interest, curiosity and satisfaction in human learning. In reinforcement learning, extrinsic rewards are often sparse and difficult to define, intrinsically motivated learning can help address…
This paper proposes \emph{Episodic and Lifelong Exploration via Maximum ENTropy} (ELEMENT), a novel, multiscale, intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning (RL) framework that is able to explore environments without using any extrinsic…
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…
Maintaining the long-term exploration capability of the agent remains one of the critical challenges in deep reinforcement learning. A representative solution is to leverage reward shaping to provide intrinsic rewards for the agent to…
Reinforcement learning has been shown to be highly successful at many challenging tasks. However, success heavily relies on well-shaped rewards. Intrinsically motivated RL attempts to remove this constraint by defining an intrinsic reward…
Effective exploration is critical for reinforcement learning agents in environments with sparse rewards or high-dimensional state-action spaces. Recent works based on state-visitation counts, curiosity and entropy-maximization generate…
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…
This paper aims to establish an entropy-regularized value-based reinforcement learning method that can ensure the monotonic improvement of policies at each policy update. Unlike previously proposed lower-bounds on policy improvement in…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to balance exploiting the current best strategy with exploring new options that could lead to higher rewards. Most common RL algorithms use undirected exploration, i.e., select random sequences of…
Autonomous navigation in crowded environments is an open problem with many applications, essential for the coexistence of robots and humans in the smart cities of the future. In recent years, deep reinforcement learning approaches have…
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.…
We consider the problem of reinforcement learning under safety requirements, in which an agent is trained to complete a given task, typically formalized as the maximization of a reward signal over time, while concurrently avoiding…
Reinforcement learning for embodied agents is a challenging problem. The accumulated reward to be optimized is often a very rugged function, and gradient methods are impaired by many local optimizers. We demonstrate, in an experimental…