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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2026
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21391 |
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| _version_ | 1866917231272656896 |
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| author | Cho, Minjae Tran, Huy Trong |
| author_facet | Cho, Minjae Tran, Huy Trong |
| contents | 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 rewards can also provide principled guidance for exploration by, for example, combining them with extrinsic rewards to optimize a policy or using them to train subpolicies for hierarchical learning. However, the former approach suffers from unstable credit assignment, while the latter exhibits sample inefficiency and sub-optimality. We propose a policy optimization framework that leverages multiple intrinsic rewards to directly optimize a policy for an extrinsic reward without pretraining subpolicies. Our algorithm -- intrinsic reward policy optimization (IRPO) -- achieves this by using a surrogate policy gradient that provides a more informative learning signal than the true gradient in sparse-reward environments. We demonstrate that IRPO improves performance and sample efficiency relative to baselines in discrete and continuous environments, and formally analyze the optimization problem solved by IRPO. Our code is available at https://github.com/Mgineer117/IRPO. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_21391 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Intrinsic Reward Policy Optimization for Sparse-Reward Environments Cho, Minjae Tran, Huy Trong Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence 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 rewards can also provide principled guidance for exploration by, for example, combining them with extrinsic rewards to optimize a policy or using them to train subpolicies for hierarchical learning. However, the former approach suffers from unstable credit assignment, while the latter exhibits sample inefficiency and sub-optimality. We propose a policy optimization framework that leverages multiple intrinsic rewards to directly optimize a policy for an extrinsic reward without pretraining subpolicies. Our algorithm -- intrinsic reward policy optimization (IRPO) -- achieves this by using a surrogate policy gradient that provides a more informative learning signal than the true gradient in sparse-reward environments. We demonstrate that IRPO improves performance and sample efficiency relative to baselines in discrete and continuous environments, and formally analyze the optimization problem solved by IRPO. Our code is available at https://github.com/Mgineer117/IRPO. |
| title | Intrinsic Reward Policy Optimization for Sparse-Reward Environments |
| topic | Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21391 |