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Related papers: The Uncertainty Bellman Equation and Exploration

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In recent years, learning-based control in robotics has gained significant attention due to its capability to address complex tasks in real-world environments. With the advances in machine learning algorithms and computational capabilities,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Taekyung Kim , Jungwi Mun , Junwon Seo , Beomsu Kim , Seongil Hong

We propose a new approach to solving dynamic decision problems with rewards that are unbounded below. The approach involves transforming the Bellman equation in order to convert an unbounded problem into a bounded one. The major advantage…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2019-12-02 Qingyin Ma , John Stachurski

The interplay between exploration and exploitation in competitive multi-agent learning is still far from being well understood. Motivated by this, we study smooth Q-learning, a prototypical learning model that explicitly captures the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-06-25 Stefanos Leonardos , Georgios Piliouras , Kelly Spendlove

Current approaches to model-based offline reinforcement learning often incorporate uncertainty-based reward penalization to address the distributional shift problem. These approaches, commonly known as pessimistic value iteration, use Monte…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Abdullah Akgül , Manuel Haußmann , Melih Kandemir

In distributional reinforcement learning (RL), the estimated distribution of value function models both the parametric and intrinsic uncertainties. We propose a novel and efficient exploration method for deep RL that has two components. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-16 Borislav Mavrin , Shangtong Zhang , Hengshuai Yao , Linglong Kong , Kaiwen Wu , Yaoliang Yu

Exploration remains a key challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). Optimism in the face of uncertainty is a well-known heuristic with theoretical guarantees in the tabular setting, but how best to translate the principle to deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Brendan O'Donoghue

The explore{exploit dilemma is one of the central challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Bayesian RL solves the dilemma by providing the agent with information in the form of a prior distribution over environments; however, full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-19 Jonathan Sorg , Satinder Singh , Richard L. Lewis

In classical Q-learning, the objective is to maximize the sum of discounted rewards through iteratively using the Bellman equation as an update, in an attempt to estimate the action value function of the optimal policy. Conventionally, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Hadi S. Jomaa , Josif Grabocka , Lars Schmidt-Thieme

Distributional Reinforcement Learning (RL) maintains the entire probability distribution of the reward-to-go, i.e. the return, providing more learning signals that account for the uncertainty associated with policy performance, which may be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-24 Luchen Li , A. Aldo Faisal

In deep reinforcement learning, policy optimization methods need to deal with issues such as function approximation and the reuse of off-policy data. Standard policy gradient methods do not handle off-policy data well, leading to premature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Qing Wang , Yingru Li , Jiechao Xiong , Tong Zhang

We solve a min-max problem in a robust exploratory mean-variance problem with drift uncertainty in this paper. It is verified that robust investors choose the Sharpe ratio with minimal $L^2$ norm in an admissible set. A reinforcement…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-08-10 Chenchen Mou , Weiwei Zhang , Chao Zhou

In this paper, we investigate optimal stopping problems in a continuous-time framework where only a discrete set of stopping dates is admissible, corresponding to the Bermudan option, within the so-called exploratory formulation. We…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-09-24 Noufel Frikha , Libo Li , Daniel Chee

Resolving the exploration-exploitation trade-off remains a fundamental problem in the design and implementation of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. In this paper, we focus on model-free RL using the epsilon-greedy exploration policy,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-03 Michael Gimelfarb , Scott Sanner , Chi-Guhn Lee

Research in reinforcement learning has produced algorithms for optimal decision making under uncertainty that fall within two main types. The first employs a Bayesian framework, where optimality improves with increased computational time.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2011-09-22 Christos Dimitrakakis

Achieving efficient and scalable exploration in complex domains poses a major challenge in reinforcement learning. While Bayesian and PAC-MDP approaches to the exploration problem offer strong formal guarantees, they are often impractical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-11-23 Bradly C. Stadie , Sergey Levine , Pieter Abbeel

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

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

An inherent problem of reinforcement learning is performing exploration of an environment through random actions, of which a large portion can be unproductive. Instead, exploration can be improved by initializing the learning policy with an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Jun Jet Tai , Jordan K. Terry , Mauro S. Innocente , James Brusey , Nadjim Horri

In online reinforcement learning (RL), efficient exploration remains particularly challenging in high-dimensional environments with sparse rewards. In low-dimensional environments, where tabular parameterization is possible, count-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-21 Tianjun Zhang , Paria Rashidinejad , Jiantao Jiao , Yuandong Tian , Joseph Gonzalez , Stuart Russell

At the boundary between the known and the unknown, an agent inevitably confronts the dilemma of whether to explore or to exploit. Epistemic uncertainty reflects such boundaries, representing systematic uncertainty due to limited knowledge.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jianfei Ma , Wee Sun Lee