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Related papers: Deep Exploration via Randomized Value Functions

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Efficient exploration in complex environments remains a major challenge for reinforcement learning. We propose bootstrapped DQN, a simple algorithm that explores in a computationally and statistically efficient manner through use of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-05 Ian Osband , Charles Blundell , Alexander Pritzel , Benjamin Van Roy

Exploration is an essential component of reinforcement learning algorithms, where agents need to learn how to predict and control unknown and often stochastic environments. Reinforcement learning agents depend crucially on exploration to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Susan Amin , Maziar Gomrokchi , Harsh Satija , Herke van Hoof , Doina Precup

Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). State-of-the-art RL algorithms suffer from high sample complexity, particularly in the sparse reward case, where they can do no better than to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Philippe Morere , Gilad Francis , Tom Blau , Fabio Ramos

In addition to their undisputed success in solving classical optimization problems, neuroevolutionary and population-based algorithms have become an alternative to standard reinforcement learning methods. However, evolutionary methods often…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Jörg Stork , Martin Zaefferer , Nils Eisler , Patrick Tichelmann , Thomas Bartz-Beielstein , A. E. Eiben

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for decision processes with non-Markovian reward, in which high-level knowledge of the task in the form of reward machines is available to the learner. We consider probabilistic reward machines with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Hippolyte Bourel , Anders Jonsson , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Chenxiao Ma , Mohammad Sadegh Talebi

The concept of the value-gradient is introduced and developed in the context of reinforcement learning. It is shown that by learning the value-gradients exploration or stochastic behaviour is no longer needed to find locally optimal…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2008-03-26 Michael Fairbank

Value-function-based methods have long played an important role in reinforcement learning. However, finding the best next action given a value function of arbitrary complexity is nontrivial when the action space is too large for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Arthur Delarue , Ross Anderson , Christian Tjandraatmadja

While Bayesian-based exploration often demonstrates superior empirical performance compared to bonus-based methods in model-based reinforcement learning (RL), its theoretical understanding remains limited for model-free settings. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 He Wang , Xingyu Xu , Yuejie Chi

We present a representation-driven framework for reinforcement learning. By representing policies as estimates of their expected values, we leverage techniques from contextual bandits to guide exploration and exploitation. Particularly,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Ofir Nabati , Guy Tennenholtz , Shie Mannor

Quantifying the value of data is a fundamental problem in machine learning. Data valuation has multiple important use cases: (1) building insights about the learning task, (2) domain adaptation, (3) corrupted sample discovery, and (4)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-27 Jinsung Yoon , Sercan O. Arik , Tomas Pfister

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has improved the reasoning ability of large language models, yet training remains costly because many rollouts contribute little to optimization, considering the amount of computation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Yan Sun , Jia Guo , Stanley Kok , Zihao Wang , Zujie Wen , Zhiqiang Zhang

In continuous control, exploration is often performed through undirected strategies in which parameters of the networks or selected actions are perturbed by random noise. Although the deep setting of undirected exploration has been shown to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Baturay Saglam , Suleyman S. Kozat

We study reinforcement learning from human feedback in general Markov decision processes, where agents learn from trajectory-level preference comparisons. A central challenge in this setting is to design algorithms that select informative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Reda Ouhamma , Maryam Kamgarpour

Optimistic value estimates provide one mechanism for directed exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). The agent acts greedily with respect to an estimate of the value plus what can be seen as a value bonus. The value bonus can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Abdul Wahab , Raksha Kumaraswamy , Martha White

Randomization is a powerful tool that endows algorithms with remarkable properties. For instance, randomized algorithms excel in adversarial settings, often surpassing the worst-case performance of deterministic algorithms with large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Johannes von Oswald , Seijin Kobayashi , Yassir Akram , Angelika Steger

In practical reinforcement learning (RL), the discount factor used for estimating value functions often differs from that used for defining the evaluation objective. In this work, we study the effect that this discrepancy of discount…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Yunhao Tang , Mark Rowland , Rémi Munos , Michal Valko

A reinforcement learning agent tries to maximize its cumulative payoff by interacting in an unknown environment. It is important for the agent to explore suboptimal actions as well as to pick actions with highest known rewards. Yet, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-23 Reazul Hasan Russel

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

Randomized value functions offer a promising approach towards the challenge of efficient exploration in complex environments with high dimensional state and action spaces. Unlike traditional point estimate methods, randomized value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-02 Ahmed Touati , Harsh Satija , Joshua Romoff , Joelle Pineau , Pascal Vincent

Discrete-action reinforcement learning algorithms often falter in tasks with high-dimensional discrete action spaces due to the vast number of possible actions. A recent advancement leverages value-decomposition, a concept from multi-agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-11 David Ireland , Giovanni Montana