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Offline reinforcement learning learns policies from fixed datasets without further environment interaction. A key challenge in this setting is epistemic uncertainty, arising from limited or biased data coverage, particularly when the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Abhilash Reddy Chenreddy , Erick Delage

We show how an ensemble of $Q^*$-functions can be leveraged for more effective exploration in deep reinforcement learning. We build on well established algorithms from the bandit setting, and adapt them to the $Q$-learning setting. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-09 Richard Y. Chen , Szymon Sidor , Pieter Abbeel , John Schulman

Active learning provides a framework to adaptively query the most informative experiments towards learning an unknown black-box function. Various approaches of active learning have been proposed in the literature, however, they either focus…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Upala Junaida Islam , Kamran Paynabar , George Runger , Ashif Sikandar Iquebal

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is exploration, when local dithering methods such as epsilon-greedy sampling are insufficient to solve a given task. Many recent methods have proposed to intrinsically motivate an agent to seek…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-15 Riley Simmons-Edler , Ben Eisner , Daniel Yang , Anthony Bisulco , Eric Mitchell , Sebastian Seung , Daniel Lee

Prioritized experience replay, which improves sample efficiency by selecting relevant transitions to update parameter estimates, is a crucial component of contemporary value-based deep reinforcement learning models. Typically, transitions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Rodrigo Carrasco-Davis , Sebastian Lee , Claudia Clopath , Will Dabney

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

Automated scientific discovery using large language models relies on identifying genuinely novel solutions. Standard reinforcement learning penalizes high-variance mutations, which leads the policy to prioritize familiar patterns. As a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Kainat Riaz , Muhammad Ahmed Mohsin , Ahsan Bilal , Muhammad Umer , Ayesha Mohsin , Aqib Riaz , Ali Subhan , John M. Cioffi

The problem of robust utility maximization in an incomplete market with volatility uncertainty is considered, in the sense that the volatility of the market is only assumed to lie between two given bounds. The set of all possible models…

Probability · Mathematics 2015-04-07 Anis Matoussi , Dylan Possamaï , Chao Zhou

Adaptive decision-making in biological and artificial intelligence requires balancing the exploitation of known outcomes with the exploration of uncertain alternatives. Although prior work suggests that uncertainty generally promotes…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Payam Piray

A key challenge to deploying reinforcement learning in practice is avoiding excessive (harmful) exploration in individual episodes. We propose a natural constraint on exploration -- \textit{uniformly} outperforming a conservative policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Wanqiao Xu , Jason Yecheng Ma , Kan Xu , Hamsa Bastani , Osbert Bastani

Bayesian reinforcement learning (RL) offers a principled and elegant approach for sequential decision making under uncertainty. Most notably, Bayesian agents do not face an exploration/exploitation dilemma, a major pathology of frequentist…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Mattie Fellows , Brandon Kaplowitz , Christian Schroeder de Witt , Shimon Whiteson

Addressing the question of how to achieve optimal decision-making under risk and uncertainty is crucial for enhancing the capabilities of artificial agents that collaborate with or support humans. In this work, we address this question in…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Nicole Orzan , Erman Acar , Davide Grossi , Patrick Mannion , Roxana Rădulescu

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

Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is crucial for deploying machine learning models in high-stakes applications, where overconfident predictions can lead to serious consequences. An effective UQ method must balance computational efficiency…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Taeseong Yoon , Heeyoung Kim

Reinforcement learning agents are faced with two types of uncertainty. Epistemic uncertainty stems from limited data and is useful for exploration, whereas aleatoric uncertainty arises from stochastic environments and must be accounted for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-10 William R. Clements , Bastien Van Delft , Benoît-Marie Robaglia , Reda Bahi Slaoui , Sébastien Toth

We consider an agent's uncertainty about its environment and the problem of generalizing this uncertainty across observations. Specifically, we focus on the problem of exploration in non-tabular reinforcement learning. Drawing inspiration…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Marc G. Bellemare , Sriram Srinivasan , Georg Ostrovski , Tom Schaul , David Saxton , Remi Munos

We propose a reinforcement learning framework for discrete environments in which an agent makes both strategic and tactical decisions. The former manifests itself through the use of value function, while the latter is powered by a tree…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-05 Piotr Miłoś , Łukasz Kuciński , Konrad Czechowski , Piotr Kozakowski , Maciek Klimek

Algorithms that tackle deep exploration -- an important challenge in reinforcement learning -- have relied on epistemic uncertainty representation through ensembles or other hypermodels, exploration bonuses, or visitation count…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Vikranth Dwaracherla , Benjamin Van Roy

Despite the close connection between exploration and sample efficiency, most state of the art reinforcement learning algorithms include no considerations for exploration beyond maximizing the entropy of the policy. In this work we address…

We study the exploration-exploitation trade-off for large multiplayer coordination games where players strategise via Q-Learning, a common learning framework in multi-agent reinforcement learning. Q-Learning is known to have two…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Desmond Chan , Bart De Keijzer , Tobias Galla , Stefanos Leonardos , Carmine Ventre