Unifying Count-Based Exploration and Intrinsic Motivation | HTML5
We consider an agent’s uncertainty about its environment and the problem of generalizing this uncertainty across states. Specifically, we focus on the problem of exploration in non-tabular reinforcement learning. Drawing inspiration from the intrinsic motivation literature, we use density models to measure uncertainty, and propose a novel algorithm for deriving a pseudo-count from an arbitrary density model. This technique enables us to generalize count-based exploration algorithms to the non-tabular case. We apply our ideas to Atari 2600 games, providing sensible pseudo-counts from raw pixels. We transform these pseudo-counts into exploration bonuses and obtain significantly improved exploration in a number of hard games, including the infamously difficult Montezuma’s Revenge. Exploration algorithms for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are typically concerned with reducing the agent’s uncertainty over the environment’s reward and transition functions. In a tabular setting, this uncert
Unifying Count-Based Exploration and Intrinsic Motivation Marc G. Bellemare bellemare@google.com &Sriram Srinivasan srsrinivasan@google.com &Georg Ostrovski ostrovski@google.com &Tom Schaul schaul@google.com &David Saxton saxton@google.com Google DeepMind London, United Kingdom &Rémi Munos munos@google.com Abstract We consider an agent’s uncertainty about its environment and the problem of generalizing this uncertainty across states. Specifically, we focus on the problem of exploration in non-tabular reinforcement learning. Drawing inspiration from the intrinsic motivation literature, we use d
related reading
- Reinforcement Learning in Newcomblike Problemsproceedings.neurips.cc
- [1709.06560] Deep Reinforcement Learning that Mattersarxiv.org
- [1710.10044] Distributional Reinforcement Learning with Quantile Regressionarxiv.org
- A Free Lunch from the Noise:Provable and Practical Exploration for Representation Learningarxiv.org
- [2602.11399] Can We Really Learn One Representation to Optimize All Rewards?arxiv.org
- c21f4ce780c5c9d774f79841b81fdc6d-Paper.pdfproceedings.neurips.cc
- Complex behavior from intrinsic motivation to occupy future action-state path spacenature.com
- Exploration for the Efficient Deployment of Reinforcement Learning Agentsopenreview.net
- 2006.10742arxiv.org
- [2507.13181] Spectral Bellman Method: Unifying Representation and Exploration in RLarxiv.org
- go-explore-nature.pdfadrien.ecoffet.com
- [1606.05312] Successor Features for Transfer in Reinforcement Learningarxiv.org