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Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning, particularly in environments where external rewards are sparse. Here we focus on exploration with intrinsic rewards, where the agent transiently augments the external rewards with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Changmin Yu , Neil Burgess , Maneesh Sahani , Samuel J. Gershman

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to discover better actions through exploration. However, typical exploration techniques aim to maximize rewards, often incurring high costs in both exploration and learning processes. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Akane Tsuboya , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi

Research in reinforcement learning has produced algorithms for optimal decision making under uncertainty that fall within two main types. The first employs a Bayesian framework, where optimality improves with increased computational time.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2011-09-22 Christos Dimitrakakis

There is a strong link between the general concept of intelligence and the ability to collect and use information. The theory of Bayes-adaptive exploration offers an attractive optimality framework for training machines to perform complex…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-20 Luca Ambrogioni

The aim of this paper is to study the reward based policy exploration problem in a supervised learning approach and enable robots to form complex movement trajectories in challenging reward settings and search spaces. For this, the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-10 M. Tuluhan Akbulut , Utku Bozdogan , Ahmet Tekden , Emre Ugur

We introduce Reinforcement Learning (RL) with Adaptive Verifiable Environments (RLVE), an approach using verifiable environments that procedurally generate problems and provide algorithmically verifiable rewards, to scale up RL for language…

In practice, the parameters of control policies are often tuned manually. This is time-consuming and frustrating. Reinforcement learning is a promising alternative that aims to automate this process, yet often requires too many experiments…

Bayesian inference over the reward presents an ideal solution to the ill-posed nature of the inverse reinforcement learning problem. Unfortunately current methods generally do not scale well beyond the small tabular setting due to the need…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-15 Alex J. Chan , Mihaela van der Schaar

We introduce STRIVE (SpatioTemporal Reinforcement with Importance-aware Variant Exploration), a structured reinforcement learning framework for video question answering. While group-based policy optimization methods have shown promise in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Emad Bahrami , Olga Zatsarynna , Parth Pathak , Sunando Sengupta , Juergen Gall , Mohsen Fayyaz

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Viraj Mehta , Ian Char , Joseph Abbate , Rory Conlin , Mark D. Boyer , Stefano Ermon , Jeff Schneider , Willie Neiswanger

The mutual information is a core statistical quantity that has applications in all areas of machine learning, whether this is in training of density models over multiple data modalities, in maximising the efficiency of noisy transmission…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-09-30 Shakir Mohamed , Danilo Jimenez Rezende

We introduce Random Reward Perturbation (RRP), a novel exploration strategy for reinforcement learning (RL). Our theoretical analyses demonstrate that adding zero-mean noise to environmental rewards effectively enhances policy diversity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Haozhe Ma , Guoji Fu , Zhengding Luo , Jiele Wu , Tze-Yun Leong

Directed Exploration is a crucial challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), especially when rewards are sparse. Information-directed sampling (IDS), which optimizes the information ratio, seeks to do so by augmenting regret with information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-20 Souradip Chakraborty , Amrit Singh Bedi , Alec Koppel , Mengdi Wang , Furong Huang , Dinesh Manocha

Balancing exploration and exploitation is a fundamental part of reinforcement learning, yet most state-of-the-art algorithms use a naive exploration protocol like $\epsilon$-greedy. This contributes to the problem of high sample complexity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Tom Blau , Lionel Ott , Fabio Ramos

Exploration is a key problem in reinforcement learning, since agents can only learn from data they acquire in the environment. With that in mind, maintaining a population of agents is an attractive method, as it allows data be collected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Jack Parker-Holder , Aldo Pacchiano , Krzysztof Choromanski , Stephen Roberts

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Feedback (RLVF) has become a key technique for enhancing the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, its reliance on sparse, outcome based rewards, which only indicate if a final…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Ang Li , Zhihang Yuan , Yang Zhang , Shouda Liu , Yisen Wang

Efficient exploration remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning, especially when an environment contains large state spaces, deceptive local optima, or sparse rewards. To tackle this problem, we present a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Zhang-Wei Hong , Tzu-Yun Shann , Shih-Yang Su , Yi-Hsiang Chang , Chun-Yi Lee

Two hitherto disconnected threads of research, diverse exploration (DE) and maximum entropy RL have addressed a wide range of problems facing reinforcement learning algorithms via ostensibly distinct mechanisms. In this work, we identify a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Andrew Cohen , Lei Yu , Xingye Qiao , Xiangrong Tong

A popular perspective in Reinforcement learning (RL) casts the problem as probabilistic inference on a graphical model of the Markov decision process (MDP). The core object of study is the probability of each state-action pair being visited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-23 Jean Tarbouriech , Tor Lattimore , Brendan O'Donoghue