arXiv:2601.21391cs.LGcs.AI2026-01

用多重内在奖励直接优化策略,提升稀疏奖励环境下的学习效率。

Intrinsic Reward Policy Optimization for Sparse-Reward Environments

  • 通过代理梯度融合多类内在奖励,直接优化主策略。
  • 在离散与连续环境中均显著提升样本效率和性能表现。
  • 无需预训练子策略,适合复杂稀疏奖励任务的强化学习应用。

探索在强化学习中至关重要,因智能体依赖试错来学习最优策略。然而,在奖励稀疏的情况下,简单的探索策略(如噪声注入)往往不足。内在奖励可通过与外在奖励结合来指导探索,或用于训练分层学习的子策略。但前者存在信用分配不稳定问题,后者则样本效率低且次优。本文提出一种策略优化框架,利用多重内在奖励直接优化外在奖励的策略,无需预训练子策略。算法IRPO通过代理策略梯度提供比真实梯度更丰富的学习信号,尤其在稀疏奖励环境下。实验表明,IRPO在离散与连续环境中均优于基线,显著提升性能与样本效率。我们还形式化分析了IRPO所解决的优化问题。代码已开源:https://github.com/Mgineer117/IRPO。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

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.

强化学习稀疏奖励内在奖励策略优化

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