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Related papers: Exploration Potential

200 papers

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

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

Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and is of prime importance in sparse reward environments. However, many of the state of the art deep reinforcement learning algorithms, that rely on epsilon-greedy, fail on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-15 Navneet Madhu Kumar

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Tim Grams , Patrick Betz , Sascha Marton , Stefan Lüdtke , Christian Bartelt

Realistic environments often provide agents with very limited feedback. When the environment is initially unknown, the feedback, in the beginning, can be completely absent, and the agents may first choose to devote all their effort on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Pierre Ménard , Omar Darwiche Domingues , Anders Jonsson , Emilie Kaufmann , Edouard Leurent , Michal Valko

Exploration has been a crucial part of reinforcement learning, yet several important questions concerning exploration efficiency are still not answered satisfactorily by existing analytical frameworks. These questions include exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-12-06 Liangpeng Zhang , Ke Tang , Xin Yao

Reinforcement learning studies how to balance exploration and exploitation in real-world systems, optimizing interactions with the world while simultaneously learning how the world operates. One general class of algorithms for such learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-10 Iñigo Urteaga , Chris H. Wiggins

We study the challenging exploration incentive problem in both bandit and reinforcement learning, where the rewards are scale-free and potentially unbounded, driven by real-world scenarios and differing from existing work. Past works in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Mengfan Xu , Diego Klabjan

Exploration is one of the most important tasks in Reinforcement Learning, but it is not well-defined beyond finite problems in the Dynamic Programming paradigm (see Subsection 2.4). We provide a reinterpretation of exploration which can be…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-24 John C. Raisbeck , Matthew W. Allen , Hakho Lee

In order to compute near-optimal policies with policy-gradient algorithms, it is common in practice to include intrinsic exploration terms in the learning objective. Although the effectiveness of these terms is usually justified by an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

The exploration-exploitation dilemma has been an intriguing and unsolved problem within the framework of reinforcement learning. "Optimism in the face of uncertainty" and model building play central roles in advanced exploration methods.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2008-10-21 István Szita , András Lőrincz

Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Max Simchowitz , Tiancheng Yu

We consider incentivized exploration: a version of multi-armed bandits where the choice of arms is controlled by self-interested agents, and the algorithm can only issue recommendations. The algorithm controls the flow of information, and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Mark Sellke , Aleksandrs Slivkins

We integrate information-theoretic concepts into the design and analysis of optimistic algorithms and Thompson sampling. By making a connection between information-theoretic quantities and confidence bounds, we obtain results that relate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-25 Xiuyuan Lu , Benjamin Van Roy

Reinforcement learning can greatly benefit from the use of options as a way of encoding recurring behaviours and to foster exploration. An important open problem is how can an agent autonomously learn useful options when solving particular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-07 Manuel Del Verme , Bruno Castro da Silva , Gianluca Baldassarre

Several recent works have been dedicated to unsupervised reinforcement learning in a single environment, in which a policy is first pre-trained with unsupervised interactions, and then fine-tuned towards the optimal policy for several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-17 Mirco Mutti , Mattia Mancassola , Marcello Restelli

Sequential decision tasks with incomplete information are characterized by the exploration problem; namely the trade-off between further exploration for learning more about the environment and immediate exploitation of the accrued…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-02-21 Grigoris I. Karakoulas

The exploration \& exploitation dilemma poses significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, curiosity-based exploration methods achieved great success in tackling hard-exploration problems. However, they necessitate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Yiran Wang , Chenshu Liu , Yunfan Li , Sanae Amani , Bolei Zhou , Lin F. Yang

A recent body of work addresses safety constraints in explore-and-exploit systems. Such constraints arise where, for example, exploration is carried out by individuals whose welfare should be balanced with overall welfare. In this paper, we…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Gal Bahar , Omer Ben-Porat , Kevin Leyton-Brown , Moshe Tennenholtz

We study the repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal indirectly interacts with the unknown environment by proposing incentives for the agent to play arms. Most existing work assumes the agent has full knowledge of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Junyan Liu , Lillian J. Ratliff