arXiv AI By Hoda Yamani, Henry Williams, Bruce A. MacDonald

Integrating Novelty and Surprise for Experience Prioritization and Exploration in Image-Based Reinforcement Learning

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The paper proposes Novelty and Surprise Prioritized Experience Replay (NSPER) for image-based reinforcement learning, combining novelty to highlight underrepresented states and surprise to reveal gaps in the agent’s knowledge. An extended version, NSPER+R, also uses these signals as intrinsic rewards to enhance both replay quality and exploration. Experiments on DeepMind Control Suite tasks demonstrate that NSPER and NSPER+R accelerate training and improve convergence compared to existing methods.

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