Related papers: The Uncertainty Bellman Equation and Exploration
We propose a generic, Bayesian, information geometric approach to the exploration--exploitation trade-off in multi-armed bandit problems. Our approach, BelMan, uniformly supports pure exploration, exploration--exploitation, and two-phase…
Human cooperation depends on how accurately we infer others' motives--how much they value fairness, generosity, or self-interest from the choices they make. We model that process in binary dictator games, which isolate moral trade-offs…
The performance of acquisition functions for Bayesian optimisation to locate the global optimum of continuous functions is investigated in terms of the Pareto front between exploration and exploitation. We show that Expected Improvement…
Natural learners must compute an estimate of future outcomes that follow from a stimulus in continuous time. Widely used reinforcement learning algorithms discretize continuous time and estimate either transition functions from one step to…
We introduce exploration potential, a quantity that measures how much a reinforcement learning agent has explored its environment class. In contrast to information gain, exploration potential takes the problem's reward structure into…
The imbalance of exploration and exploitation has long been a significant challenge in reinforcement learning. In policy optimization, excessive reliance on exploration reduces learning efficiency, while over-dependence on exploitation…
In this paper, we study policy evaluation in continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL), where the state follows an unknown stochastic differential equation (SDE), but only discrete-time data are available. We first highlight that the…
In real-world decision-making problems, for instance in the fields of finance, robotics or autonomous driving, keeping uncertainty under control is as important as maximizing expected returns. Risk aversion has been addressed in the…
We propose Deterministic Sequencing of Exploration and Exploitation (DSEE) algorithm with interleaving exploration and exploitation epochs for model-based RL problems that aim to simultaneously learn the system model, i.e., a Markov…
Pure exploration in episodic Reinforcement Learning has primarily focused on Best Policy Identification (BPI), which seeks to identify a (near)-optimal policy with high confidence. Motivated by practical settings where a ``good enough''…
This work provides a rigorous framework for studying continuous time control problems in uncertain environments. The framework considered models uncertainty in state dynamics as a measure on the space of functions. This measure is…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) remains a central optimisation framework in machine learning. Although RL agents can converge to optimal solutions, the definition of ``optimality'' depends on the environment's statistical properties. The…
In this research work, probabilistic decision-making approaches are studied, e.g. Bayesian and Boltzmann strategies, along with various deterministic exploration strategies, e.g. greedy, epsilon-Greedy and random approaches. In this…
Game theory relies heavily on the availability of cardinal utility functions, but in fields such as matching markets, only ordinal preferences are typically elicited. The literature focuses on mechanisms with simple dominant strategies, but…
Exploration and reward specification are fundamental and intertwined challenges for reinforcement learning. Solving sequential decision-making tasks requiring expansive exploration requires either careful design of reward functions or the…
Model-free reinforcement learning methods such as the Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm (PPO) have successfully applied in complex decision-making problems such as Atari games. However, these methods suffer from high variances and high…
Several recent works encourage the use of a Bayesian framework when assessing performance and fairness metrics of a classification algorithm in a supervised setting. We propose the Uncertainty Matters (UM) framework that generalizes a…
A primary requirement for any reinforcement learning method is that it should produce policies that improve upon the initial guess. In this work, we show that the widely used Deep Q-Network (DQN) fails to satisfy this minimal criterion --…
High-quality estimates of uncertainty and robustness are crucial for numerous real-world applications, especially for deep learning which underlies many deployed ML systems. The ability to compare techniques for improving these estimates is…
While in general trading off exploration and exploitation in reinforcement learning is hard, under some formulations relatively simple solutions exist. In this paper, we first derive upper bounds for the utility of selecting different…