{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/locally-persistent-exploration-in-continuous","title":"Locally Persistent Exploration in Continuous Control Tasks with Sparse Rewards","arxiv_id":"2012.13658","date":"2020-12-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Susan Amin","Maziar Gomrokchi","Hossein Aboutalebi","Harsh Satija","Doina Precup"],"abstract":"A major challenge in reinforcement learning is the design of exploration strategies, especially for environments with sparse reward structures and continuous state and action spaces. Intuitively, if the reinforcement signal is very scarce, the agent should rely on some form of short-term memory in order to cover its environment efficiently. We propose a new exploration method, based on two intuitions: (1) the choice of the next exploratory action should depend not only on the (Markovian) state of the environment, but also on the agent's trajectory so far, and (2) the agent should utilize a measure of spread in the state space to avoid getting stuck in a small region. Our method leverages concepts often used in statistical physics to provide explanations for the behavior of simplified (polymer) chains in order to generate persistent (locally self-avoiding) trajectories in state space. We discuss the theoretical properties of locally self-avoiding walks and their ability to provide a kind of short-term memory through a decaying temporal correlation within the trajectory. We provide empirical evaluations of our approach in a simulated 2D navigation task, as well as higher-dimensional MuJoCo continuous control locomotion tasks with sparse rewards.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.13658v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.13658v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"locally-persistent-exploration-in-continuous","repo_url":"https://github.com/h-aboutalebi/SparseBaseline","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"continuous-control","task_name":"Continuous Control"},{"task_slug":"mujoco","task_name":"MuJoCo"},{"task_slug":"continuous-control","task_name":"continuous-control"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2012.13658","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2012.13658"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/h-aboutalebi/SparseBaseline","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"cf10259e402a2364","entry":"PolyRL","repo":"h-aboutalebi/SparseBaseline","repo_kind":"official","path":"engine/algorithms/DDPG_POLYRL/poly_rl.py","file_url":"https://github.com/h-aboutalebi/SparseBaseline/blob/HEAD/engine/algorithms/DDPG_POLYRL/poly_rl.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"cf10259e402a2364"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}