Related papers: The Uncertainty Bellman Equation and Exploration
Active inference is a probabilistic framework for modelling the behaviour of biological and artificial agents, which derives from the principle of minimising free energy. In recent years, this framework has successfully been applied to a…
Reinforcement learning (RL) systems typically optimize scalar reward functions that assume precise and reliable evaluation of outcomes. However, real-world objectives--especially those derived from human preferences--are often uncertain,…
Although exploration in reinforcement learning is well understood from a theoretical point of view, provably correct methods remain impractical. In this paper we study the interplay between exploration and approximation, what we call…
Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and even recent state-of-the art curiosity-based methods rely on the simple epsilon-greedy strategy to generate novelty. We argue that pure random walks do not succeed to…
We consider reinforcement learning (RL) in continuous time and study the problem of achieving the best trade-off between exploration of a black box environment and exploitation of current knowledge. We propose an entropy-regularized reward…
Ensuring sufficient exploration is a central challenge when training meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) agents to solve novel environments. Conventional solutions to the exploration-exploitation dilemma inject explicit incentives such as…
This paper provides a theoretical understanding of Deep Q-Network (DQN) with the $\varepsilon$-greedy exploration in deep reinforcement learning. Despite the tremendous empirical achievement of the DQN, its theoretical characterization…
Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is crucial in machine learning, yet most (axiomatic) studies of uncertainty measures focus on classification, leaving a gap in regression settings with limited formal justification and evaluations. In this…
The paper deals with a risk averse dynamic programming problem with infinite horizon. First, the required assumptions are formulated to have the problem well defined. Then the Bellman equation is derived, which may be also seen as a…
Empowerment is an information-theoretic method that can be used to intrinsically motivate learning agents. It attempts to maximize an agent's control over the environment by encouraging visiting states with a large number of reachable next…
Optimistic exploration is central to improving sample efficiency in reinforcement learning with human feedback, yet existing exploratory bonus methods to incentivize exploration often fail to realize optimism. We provide a theoretical…
Bayesian optimization (BO) is an effective approach to optimize expensive black-box functions, that seeks to trade-off between exploitation (selecting parameters where the maximum is likely) and exploration (selecting parameters where we…
The exploration \& exploitation dilemma poses significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, curiosity-based exploration methods achieved great success in tackling hard-exploration problems. However, they necessitate…
Binary classification involves predicting the label of an instance based on whether the model score for the positive class exceeds a threshold chosen based on the application requirements (e.g., maximizing recall for a precision bound).…
Efficient exploration in deep reinforcement learning remains a fundamental challenge, especially in environments characterized by high-dimensional states and sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies that rely on random local…
The key to building trustworthy large language models (LLMs) lies in endowing them with inherent uncertainty expression capabilities, thereby mitigating overconfident errors in high-stakes applications. However, existing RL paradigms such…
We study the problem of learning exploration-exploitation strategies that effectively adapt to dynamic environments, where the task may change over time. While RNN-based policies could in principle represent such strategies, in practice…
Non-stationary environments pose a fundamental challenge for deep reinforcement learning, as changes in dynamics or rewards invalidate learned value functions and cause catastrophic forgetting. We propose \emph{Gradient-Boosted Deep…
Reinforcement learning (RL) for continuous control under delayed rewards is an under-explored problem despite its significance in real-world applications. Many complex skills are based on intermediate ones as prerequisites. For instance, a…
In the 1990s, after a series of experiments, the behavioral psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues formulated the following Peak-End evaluation rule: "The remembered utility of pleasant or unpleasant episodes is…