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Surprise-Based Intrinsic Motivation for Deep Reinforcement Learning

4 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

4 Pith papers citing it
abstract

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 strategies such as $\epsilon$-greedy action selection or Gaussian control noise, but there are many tasks where these methods are insufficient to make any learning progress. Here, we consider more complex heuristics: efficient and scalable exploration strategies that maximize a notion of an agent's surprise about its experiences via intrinsic motivation. We propose to learn a model of the MDP transition probabilities concurrently with the policy, and to form intrinsic rewards that approximate the KL-divergence of the true transition probabilities from the learned model. One of our approximations results in using surprisal as intrinsic motivation, while the other gives the $k$-step learning progress. We show that our incentives enable agents to succeed in a wide range of environments with high-dimensional state spaces and very sparse rewards, including continuous control tasks and games in the Atari RAM domain, outperforming several other heuristic exploration techniques.

fields

cs.LG 3 cs.RO 1

verdicts

UNVERDICTED 4

representative citing papers

Goal-Conditioned Agents that Learn Everything All at Once

cs.LG · 2026-05-22 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

LEO enables efficient all-goals learning in goal-conditioned RL by jointly predicting for all goals in one network pass, yielding >250x speedup over relabelling and better performance on Craftax.

Neural Embedding for Physical Manipulations

cs.LG · 2019-07-13 · unverdicted · novelty 4.0

Generative model with normalized pairwise distance constraint discovers output space topologies from sparse data and outperforms GANs and VAEs by avoiding mode collapse.

citing papers explorer

Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.

  • Goal-Conditioned Agents that Learn Everything All at Once cs.LG · 2026-05-22 · unverdicted · none · ref 90 · internal anchor

    LEO enables efficient all-goals learning in goal-conditioned RL by jointly predicting for all goals in one network pass, yielding >250x speedup over relabelling and better performance on Craftax.

  • Learning World Graphs to Accelerate Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning cs.LG · 2019-07-01 · unverdicted · none · ref 2 · internal anchor

    A two-stage framework learns a world graph of pivotal states task-agnostically via joint training of a latent model and curiosity-driven policy, then uses the graph to accelerate hierarchical RL on maze tasks.

  • LLM-Guided Task- and Affordance-Level Exploration in Reinforcement Learning cs.RO · 2025-09-20 · unverdicted · none · ref 5 · internal anchor

    LLM-TALE steers RL exploration using LLM-generated plans at task and affordance levels with online suboptimality correction, improving sample efficiency and success rates on pick-and-place tasks without human supervision.

  • Neural Embedding for Physical Manipulations cs.LG · 2019-07-13 · unverdicted · none · ref 14 · internal anchor

    Generative model with normalized pairwise distance constraint discovers output space topologies from sparse data and outperforms GANs and VAEs by avoiding mode collapse.