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What drives exploration? Understanding intrinsic motivation is a long-standing challenge in both cognitive science and artificial intelligence; numerous objectives have been proposed and used to train agents, yet there remains a gap between…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Aly Lidayan , Yuqing Du , Eliza Kosoy , Maria Rufova , Pieter Abbeel , Alison Gopnik

Inverse reinforcement learning is the problem of inferring a reward function from an optimal policy or demonstrations by an expert. In this work, it is assumed that the reward is expressed as a reward machine whose transitions depend on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Mohamad Louai Shehab , Antoine Aspeel , Necmiye Ozay

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (URL) aims to pre-train agents by exploring diverse states or skills in reward-free environments, facilitating efficient adaptation to downstream tasks. As the agent cannot access extrinsic rewards during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Chengyang Ying , Huayu Chen , Xinning Zhou , Zhongkai Hao , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

Intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning aims to address the exploration challenge for sparse-reward tasks. However, the study of exploration methods in transition-dependent multi-agent settings is largely absent from the literature.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-30 Tonghan Wang , Jianhao Wang , Yi Wu , Chongjie Zhang

To rapidly learn a new task, it is often essential for agents to explore efficiently -- especially when performance matters from the first timestep. One way to learn such behaviour is via meta-learning. Many existing methods however rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-11 Luisa Zintgraf , Leo Feng , Cong Lu , Maximilian Igl , Kristian Hartikainen , Katja Hofmann , Shimon Whiteson

Learning with an objective to minimize the mismatch with a reference distribution has been shown to be useful for generative modeling and imitation learning. In this paper, we investigate whether one such objective, the Wasserstein-1…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Ishan Durugkar , Mauricio Tec , Scott Niekum , Peter Stone

We present an iterative inverse reinforcement learning algorithm to infer optimal cost functions in continuous spaces. Based on a popular maximum entropy criteria, our approach iteratively finds a weight improvement step and proposes a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Sarmad Mehrdad , Avadesh Meduri , Ludovic Righetti

We consider the problem of reward learning for temporally extended tasks. For reward learning, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is a widely used paradigm. Given a Markov decision process (MDP) and a set of demonstrations for a task, IRL…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-14 Farzan Memarian , Zhe Xu , Bo Wu , Min Wen , Ufuk Topcu

Entropy augmented to reward is known to soften the greedy argmax policy to softmax policy. Entropy augmentation is reformulated and leads to a motivation to introduce an additional entropy term to the objective function in the form of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Donghoon Lee

Markov reward processes (MRPs) are used to model stochastic phenomena arising in operations research, control engineering, robotics, and artificial intelligence, as well as communication and transportation networks. In many of these cases,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-17 Ashwin Pananjady , Martin J. Wainwright

Encouraging exploration is a critical issue in deep reinforcement learning. We investigate the effect of initial entropy that significantly influences the exploration, especially at the earlier stage. Our main observations are as follows:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Sooyoung Jang , Hyung-Il Kim

In toxicology research, experiments are often conducted to determine the effect of toxicant exposure on the behavior of mice, where mice are randomized to receive the toxicant or not. In particular, in fixed interval experiments, one…

We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous time and study the problem of achieving the best trade-off between exploration of a black box environment and exploitation of current knowledge. We propose an entropy-regularized reward…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-14 Haoran Wang , Thaleia Zariphopoulou , Xunyu Zhou

In many sequential decision making tasks, it is challenging to design reward functions that help an RL agent efficiently learn behavior that is considered good by the agent designer. A number of different formulations of the reward-design…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-25 Zeyu Zheng , Junhyuk Oh , Satinder Singh

Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) reinforcement learning is a powerful learning paradigm which seeks to maximize return under entropy regularization. However, action entropy does not necessarily coincide with state entropy, e.g., when multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Nir Baram , Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

Exploring in environments with high-dimensional observations is hard. One promising approach for exploration is to use intrinsic rewards, which often boils down to estimating "novelty" of states, transitions, or trajectories with deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Toru Lin , Allan Jabri

Efficient exploration is necessary to achieve good sample efficiency for reinforcement learning in general. From small, tabular settings such as gridworlds to large, continuous and sparse reward settings such as robotic object manipulation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-20 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Emma Brunskill

Although exploration in reinforcement learning is well understood from a theoretical point of view, provably correct methods remain impractical. In this paper we study the interplay between exploration and approximation, what we call…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-25 Adrien Ali Taïga , Aaron Courville , Marc G. Bellemare

Reinforcement learning agents learn from rewards, but humans can uniquely assign value to novel, abstract outcomes in a goal-dependent manner. However, this flexibility is cognitively costly, making learning less efficient. Here, we propose…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-09-11 Gaia Molinaro , Anne G. E. Collins