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Related papers: Exploration Potential

200 papers

This work considers a repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal can only interact with her environment through the agent. The principal and the agent have misaligned objectives and the choice of action is only left to the…

Incentivized exploration in multi-armed bandits (MAB) has witnessed increasing interests and many progresses in recent years, where a principal offers bonuses to agents to do explorations on her behalf. However, almost all existing studies…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-28 Chengshuai Shi , Haifeng Xu , Wei Xiong , Cong Shen

The ability to explore efficiently and effectively is a central challenge of reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider exploration through the lens of information theory. Specifically, we cast exploration as a problem of maximizing…

This paper introduces the framework of multi-armed sampling, which serves as the sampling counterpart to the optimization problem of multi-armed bandits. Our primary motivation is to rigorously examine the exploration-exploitation trade-off…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Mohammad Pedramfar , Siamak Ravanbakhsh

Reinforcement Learning agents are expected to eventually perform well. Typically, this takes the form of a guarantee about the asymptotic behavior of an algorithm given some assumptions about the environment. We present an algorithm for a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Michael K. Cohen , Elliot Catt , Marcus Hutter

We consider a ubiquitous scenario in the Internet economy when individual decision-makers (henceforth, agents) both produce and consume information as they make strategic choices in an uncertain environment. This creates a three-way…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-04-09 Yishay Mansour , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Zhiwei Steven Wu

Exploration is essential for reinforcement learning (RL). To face the challenges of exploration, we consider a reward-free RL framework that completely separates exploration from exploitation and brings new challenges for exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Chuheng Zhang , Yuanying Cai , Longbo Huang , Jian Li

Autonomous exploration of cluttered environments requires efficient exploration strategies that guarantee safety against potential collisions with unknown random obstacles. This paper presents a novel approach combining a graph neural…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Gabriele Calzolari , Vidya Sumathy , Christoforos Kanellakis , George Nikolakopoulos

We introduce a class of learning problems where the agent is presented with a series of tasks. Intuitively, if there is relation among those tasks, then the information gained during execution of one task has value for the execution of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-09-06 Christos Dimitrakakis

Recent advancements in agentic test-time scaling allow models to gather environmental feedback before committing to final actions. A key limitation of existing methods is that they typically employ undifferentiated exploration strategies,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Xingyuan Hua , Sheng Yue , Ju Ren

We initiate the study of tradeoffs between exploration and exploitation in online learning of properties of quantum states. Given sequential oracle access to an unknown quantum state, in each round, we are tasked to choose an observable…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-06-29 Josep Lumbreras , Erkka Haapasalo , Marco Tomamichel

In the incentivized exploration model, a principal aims to explore and learn over time by interacting with a sequence of self-interested agents. It has been recently understood that the main challenge in designing incentive-compatible…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Benjamin Schiffer , Mark Sellke

Cultures around the world show varying levels of conservatism. While maintaining traditional ideas prevents wrong ones from being embraced, it also slows or prevents adaptation to new times. Without exploration there can be no improvement,…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2023-04-17 Brian Mintz , Feng Fu

This paper addresses the exploration-exploitation dilemma inherent in decision-making, focusing on multi-armed bandit problems. The problems involve an agent deciding whether to exploit current knowledge for immediate gains or explore new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-06 Alex Barbier-Chebbah , Christian L. Vestergaard , Jean-Baptiste Masson

The multi-agent setting is intricate and unpredictable since the behaviors of multiple agents influence one another. To address this environmental uncertainty, distributional reinforcement learning algorithms that incorporate uncertainty…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Jihwan Oh , Joonkee Kim , Minchan Jeong , Se-Young Yun

In reinforcement learning, an agent interacts sequentially with an environment to maximize a reward, receiving only partial, probabilistic feedback. This creates a fundamental exploration-exploitation trade-off: the agent must explore to…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-27 Josep Lumbreras , Ruo Cheng Huang , Yanglin Hu , Marco Fanizza , Mile Gu

Recommendation systems often face exploration-exploitation tradeoffs: the system can only learn about the desirability of new options by recommending them to some user. Such systems can thus be modeled as multi-armed bandit settings;…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-07-02 Gal Bahar , Omer Ben-Porat , Kevin Leyton-Brown , Moshe Tennenholtz

What drives exploration? Understanding intrinsic motivation is a long-standing challenge in both cognitive science and artificial intelligence; numerous objectives have been proposed and used to train agents, yet there remains a gap between…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Aly Lidayan , Yuqing Du , Eliza Kosoy , Maria Rufova , Pieter Abbeel , Alison Gopnik

Balancing exploration and exploitation is a central goal in reinforcement learning (RL). Despite recent advances in enhancing large language model (LLM) reasoning, most methods lean toward exploitation, and increasingly encounter…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Daixuan Cheng , Shaohan Huang , Xuekai Zhu , Bo Dai , Wayne Xin Zhao , Zhenliang Zhang , Furu Wei

Stochastic multi-armed bandits solve the Exploration-Exploitation dilemma and ultimately maximize the expected reward. Nonetheless, in many practical problems, maximizing the expected reward is not the most desirable objective. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-10 Amir Sani , Alessandro Lazaric , Rémi Munos