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Related papers: Exploration Potential

200 papers

Deep reinforcement learning was instigated with the presence of trust region methods, being scalable and efficient. However, the pessimism of such algorithms, among which it forces to constrain in a trust region by all means, has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Jianfei Ma

In this paper, we propose an information-theoretic exploration strategy for stochastic, discrete multi-armed bandits that achieves optimal regret. Our strategy is based on the value of information criterion. This criterion measures the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-03-06 Isaac J. Sledge , Jose C. Principe

Reinforcement Learning is a powerful tool to model decision-making processes. However, it relies on an exploration-exploitation trade-off that remains an open challenge for many tasks. In this work, we study neighboring state-based,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Yu-Teng Li , Justin Lin , Jeffery Cheng , Pedro Pachuca

Contextual bandit learning is a reinforcement learning problem where the learner repeatedly receives a set of features (context), takes an action and receives a reward based on the action and context. We consider this problem under a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-05 Alekh Agarwal , Miroslav Dudík , Satyen Kale , John Langford , Robert E. Schapire

Multi-agent reinforcement learning serves as an effective tool for studying strategy adaptation in evolutionary games. Although prior work has integrated Q-learning with reputation mechanisms to promote cooperation, most existing algorithms…

Computational Physics · Physics 2026-04-10 An Li , Wenqiang Zhu , Chaoqian Wang , Longzhao Liu , Hongwei Zheng , Yishen Jiang , Xin Wang , Shaoting Tang

Proper balance between exploitation and exploration is what makes good decisions, which achieve high rewards like payoff or evolutionary fitness. The Infomax principle postulates that maximization of information directs the function of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-25 Gautam Reddy , Antonio Celani , Massimo Vergassola

Curiosity-based reward schemes can present powerful exploration mechanisms which facilitate the discovery of solutions for complex, sparse or long-horizon tasks. However, as the agent learns to reach previously unexplored spaces and the…

Recent work on exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) has led to a series of increasingly complex solutions to the problem. This increase in complexity often comes at the expense of generality. Recent empirical studies suggest that,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-03 Will Dabney , Georg Ostrovski , André Barreto

Language Model (LM) agents are increasingly used in complex open-ended decision-making tasks, from AI coding to physical AI. A core requirement in these settings is the ability to both explore the problem space and exploit acquired…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Jaden Park , Jungtaek Kim , Jongwon Jeong , Robert D. Nowak , Kangwook Lee , Yong Jae Lee

With reinforcement learning, an agent could learn complex behaviors from high-level abstractions of the task. However, exploration and reward shaping remained challenging for existing methods, especially in scenarios where the extrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-11 Jie Chen , Wenjun Xu

Large language model based agents often fail in unfamiliar environments due to premature exploitation: a tendency to act on prior knowledge before acquiring sufficient environment-specific information. We identify autonomous exploration as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Ziang Ye , Wentao Shi , Yuxin Liu , Yu Wang , Zhengzhou Cai , Yaorui Shi , Qi Gu , Xunliang Cai , Fuli Feng

The main objective of this paper is to outline a theoretical framework to analyse how humans' decision-making strategies under uncertainty manage the trade-off between information gathering (exploration) and reward seeking (exploitation). A…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Antonio Candelieri , Andrea Ponti , Francesco Archetti

I study a game of strategic exploration with private payoffs and public actions in a Bayesian bandit setting. In particular, I look at cascade equilibria, in which agents switch over time from the risky action to the riskless action only…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-05-13 Aroon Narayanan

Exploration remains a central challenge for reinforcement learning (RL). Virtually all existing methods share the feature of a monolithic behaviour policy that changes only gradually (at best). In contrast, the exploratory behaviours of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-07 Miruna Pîslar , David Szepesvari , Georg Ostrovski , Diana Borsa , Tom Schaul

We propose a new computational-level objective function for theoretical biology and theoretical neuroscience that combines: reinforcement learning, the study of learning with feedback via rewards; rate-distortion theory, a branch of…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-03-21 Sarah Marzen

Recent advances in reinforcement learning have proved that given an environment we can learn to perform a task in that environment if we have access to some form of a reward function (dense, sparse or derived from IRL). But most of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Aadil Hayat , Utsav Singh , Vinay P. Namboodiri

Environments with controllable dynamics are usually understood in terms of explicit models. However, such models are not always available, but may sometimes be learned by exploring an environment. In this work, we investigate using an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Peter N. Loxley , Friedrich T. Sommer

How to best explore in domains with sparse, delayed, and deceptive rewards is an important open problem for reinforcement learning (RL). This paper considers one such domain, the recently-proposed multi-agent benchmark of Pommerman. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-30 Chao Gao , Bilal Kartal , Pablo Hernandez-Leal , Matthew E. Taylor

Determining what experience to generate to best facilitate learning (i.e. exploration) is one of the distinguishing features and open challenges in reinforcement learning. The advent of distributed agents that interact with parallel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-17 Tom Schaul , Diana Borsa , David Ding , David Szepesvari , Georg Ostrovski , Will Dabney , Simon Osindero

Intrinsic motivation enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to explore when rewards are very sparse, where traditional exploration heuristics such as Boltzmann or e-greedy would typically fail. However, intrinsic exploration is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Philippe Morere , Fabio Ramos