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Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Xinran Liang , Katherine Shu , Kimin Lee , Pieter Abbeel

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

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

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

Models of human behavior for prediction and collaboration tend to fall into two categories: ones that learn from large amounts of data via imitation learning, and ones that assume human behavior to be noisily-optimal for some reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Cassidy Laidlaw , Anca Dragan

Contextual bandits serve as a fundamental model for many sequential decision making tasks. The most popular theoretically justified approaches are based on the optimism principle. While these algorithms can be practical, they are known to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-17 Botao Hao , Tor Lattimore , Csaba Szepesvari

This paper investigates the automatic exploration problem under the unknown environment, which is the key point of applying the robotic system to some social tasks. The solution to this problem via stacking decision rules is impossible to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-07-24 Haoran Li , Qichao Zhang , Dongbin Zhao

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

Decision-making under uncertainty is a fundamental problem encountered frequently and can be formulated as a stochastic multi-armed bandit problem. In the problem, the learner interacts with an environment by choosing an action at each…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-24 Jonathan Gornet , Bruno Sinopoli

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for those tasks where rewards from environments are sparse. A commonly used approach for exploring such environments is to introduce some "intrinsic"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Neale Ratzlaff , Qinxun Bai , Li Fuxin , Wei Xu

In this paper we propose a framework towards achieving two intertwined objectives: (i) equipping reinforcement learning with active exploration and deliberate information gathering, such that it regulates state and parameter uncertainties…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Mohammad S. Ramadan , Mahmoud A. Hayajnh , Michael T. Tolley , Kyriakos G. Vamvoudakis

Exploration in unknown environments is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning and control. In this work, we study task-guided exploration and determine what precisely an agent must learn about their environment in order to complete…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Andrew Wagenmaker , Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson

This paper introduces a general multi-agent bandit model in which each agent is facing a finite set of arms and may communicate with other agents through a central controller in order to identify, in pure exploration, or play, in regret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-31 Clémence Réda , Sattar Vakili , Emilie Kaufmann

We develop a general theory to optimize the frequentist regret for sequential learning problems, where efficient bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms can be derived from unified Bayesian principles. We propose a novel optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Yunbei Xu , Assaf Zeevi

Model-free continuous control for robot navigation tasks using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) that relies on noisy policies for exploration is sensitive to the density of rewards. In practice, robots are usually deployed in cluttered…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-02-24 Mingyu Cai , Erfan Aasi , Calin Belta , Cristian-Ioan Vasile

We consider a stochastic bandit problem with a possibly infinite number of arms. We write $p^*$ for the proportion of optimal arms and $\Delta$ for the minimal mean-gap between optimal and sub-optimal arms. We characterize the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-08 Rianne de Heide , James Cheshire , Pierre Ménard , Alexandra Carpentier

This paper aims to put forward the concept that learning to take safe actions in unknown environments, even with probability one guarantees, can be achieved without the need for an unbounded number of exploratory trials, provided that one…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-01 Agustin Castellano , Juan Bazerque , Enrique Mallada

In a fixed-confidence pure exploration problem in stochastic multi-armed bandits, an algorithm iteratively samples arms and should stop as early as possible and return the correct answer to a query about the arms distributions. We are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Adrienne Tuynman , Rémy Degenne

Linear dynamical systems that obey stochastic differential equations are canonical models. While optimal control of known systems has a rich literature, the problem is technically hard under model uncertainty and there are hardly any…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-09 Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh , Mohamad Sadegh Shirani Faradonbeh

In this paper, we consider the low rank structure of the reward sequence of the pure exploration problems. Firstly, we propose the separated setting in pure exploration problem, where the exploration strategy cannot receive the feedback of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Yaxiong Liu , Atsuyoshi Nakamura , Kohei Hatano , Eiji Takimoto