Related papers: Planning to Be Surprised: Optimal Bayesian Explora…
Borwein et al. (2000) solved a surprise maximization problem by applying results from convex analysis and mathematical programming. Although, their proof is elegant, it requires advanced knowledge from both areas to understand it. Here, we…
Despite the availability of ever more data enabled through modern sensor and computer technology, it still remains an open problem to learn dynamical systems in a sample-efficient way. We propose active learning strategies that leverage…
The ultimate goal of optimization is to find the minimizer of a target function.However, typical criteria for active optimization often ignore the uncertainty about the minimizer. We propose a novel criterion for global optimization and an…
General criterion for best efficiency of the interaction of a complex system with an ever-changing environment is derived. Its exclusive property, set by boundedness, is that the highly non-trivial interplay between parameters that…
We develop a general problem setting for training and testing the ability of agents to gather information efficiently. Specifically, we present a collection of tasks in which success requires searching through a partially-observed…
A comprehensive artificial intelligence system needs to not only perceive the environment with different `senses' (e.g., seeing and hearing) but also infer the world's conditional (or even causal) relations and corresponding uncertainty.…
The exploration-exploitation trade-off is among the central challenges of reinforcement learning. The optimal Bayesian solution is intractable in general. This paper studies to what extent analytic statements about optimal learning are…
In many real-world scenarios where extrinsic rewards to the agent are extremely sparse, curiosity has emerged as a useful concept providing intrinsic rewards that enable the agent to explore its environment and acquire information to…
In this work, we argue that the search for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) should start from a much lower level than human-level intelligence. The circumstances of intelligent behavior in nature resulted from an organism interacting…
Exploration is a crucial skill for in-context reinforcement learning in unknown environments. However, it remains unclear if large language models can effectively explore a partially hidden state space. This work isolates exploration as the…
Robots that are trained to perform a task in a fixed environment often fail when facing unexpected changes to the environment due to a lack of exploration. We propose a principled way to adapt the policy for better exploration in changing…
We use optimism to introduce generic asymptotically optimal reinforcement learning agents. They achieve, with an arbitrary finite or compact class of environments, asymptotically optimal behavior. Furthermore, in the finite deterministic…
Embodied AI has been recently gaining attention as it aims to foster the development of autonomous and intelligent agents. In this paper, we devise a novel embodied setting in which an agent needs to explore a previously unknown environment…
To achieve general artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning (RL) agents should learn not only to optimize returns for one specific task but also to constantly build more complex skills and scaffold their knowledge about the world,…
Regardless of past learning, an agent in an open world will face unfamiliar events outside of prior experience, existing models, or policies. Further, the agent will sometimes lack relevant knowledge and/or sufficient time to assess the…
Optimal design of experiments for Bayesian inverse problems has recently gained wide popularity and attracted much attention, especially in the computational science and Bayesian inversion communities. An optimal design maximizes a…
We introduce exploration potential, a quantity that measures how much a reinforcement learning agent has explored its environment class. In contrast to information gain, exploration potential takes the problem's reward structure into…
We study Bayesian automated mechanism design in unstructured dynamic environments, where a principal repeatedly interacts with an agent, and takes actions based on the strategic agent's report of the current state of the world. Both the…
Success in the quest for artificial intelligence has the potential to bring unprecedented benefits to humanity, and it is therefore worthwhile to investigate how to maximize these benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls. This article…
We consider exploration tasks in which an autonomous mobile robot incrementally builds maps of initially unknown indoor environments. In such tasks, the robot makes a sequence of decisions on where to move next that, usually, are based on…