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Learning tabula rasa, that is without any prior knowledge, is the prevalent workflow in reinforcement learning (RL) research. However, RL systems, when applied to large-scale settings, rarely operate tabula rasa. Such large-scale systems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-05 Rishabh Agarwal , Max Schwarzer , Pablo Samuel Castro , Aaron Courville , Marc G. Bellemare

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems over general state and action spaces are notoriously challenging. In contrast to the tableau setting, one can not enumerate all the states and then iteratively update the policies for each state. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

Learning from diverse offline datasets is a promising path towards learning general purpose robotic agents. However, a core challenge in this paradigm lies in collecting large amounts of meaningful data, while not depending on a human in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Annie S. Chen , HyunJi Nam , Suraj Nair , Chelsea Finn

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved strong results on high-dimensional control tasks, but applying RL to reachability problems raises a fundamental mismatch: reachability seeks to maximize the set of states…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-18 Oswin So , Eric Yang Yu , Songyuan Zhang , Matthew Cleaveland , Mitchell Black , Chuchu Fan

In the zero-shot policy transfer (ZSPT) setting for contextual Markov decision processes (MDP), agents train on a fixed set of contexts and must generalise to new ones. Recent work has argued and demonstrated that increased exploration can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Max Weltevrede , Caroline Horsch , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Wendelin Böhmer

A default assumption in the design of reinforcement-learning algorithms is that a decision-making agent always explores to learn optimal behavior. In sufficiently complex environments that approach the vastness and scale of the real world,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Dilip Arumugam , Saurabh Kumar , Ramki Gummadi , Benjamin Van Roy

We investigate statistical uncertainty quantification for reinforcement learning (RL) and its implications in exploration policy. Despite ever-growing literature on RL applications, fundamental questions about inference and error…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-06 YI Zhu , Jing Dong , Henry Lam

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

Thompson sampling (TS) is one of the most popular exploration techniques in reinforcement learning (RL). However, most TS algorithms with theoretical guarantees are difficult to implement and not generalizable to Deep RL. While the emerging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Haque Ishfaq , Yixin Tan , Yu Yang , Qingfeng Lan , Jianfeng Lu , A. Rupam Mahmood , Doina Precup , Pan Xu

Effective exploration in reinforcement learning requires not only tracking where an agent has been, but also understanding how the agent perceives and represents the world. To learn powerful representations, an agent should actively explore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Faisal Mohamed , Catherine Ji , Benjamin Eysenbach , Glen Berseth

Reinforcement learning (RL) studies how an agent comes to achieve reward in an environment through interactions over time. Recent advances in machine RL have surpassed human expertise at the world's oldest board games and many classic video…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-28 Pedro A. Tsividis , Joao Loula , Jake Burga , Nathan Foss , Andres Campero , Thomas Pouncy , Samuel J. Gershman , Joshua B. Tenenbaum

Exploration remains a critical challenge in online reinforcement learning, as an agent must effectively explore unknown environments to achieve high returns. Currently, the main exploration algorithms are primarily count-based methods and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Zhirui Fang , Kai Yang , Jian Tao , Jiafei Lyu , Lusong Li , Li Shen , Xiu Li

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

Sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) can model a wide range of highly complex tasks. Solving sparse-reward tasks is RL's core premise, requiring efficient exploration coupled with long-horizon credit assignment, and overcoming these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Leander Diaz-Bone , Marco Bagatella , Jonas Hübotter , Andreas Krause

Efficient exploration remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, serving as a useful pretraining objective for data collection, particularly when an external reward function is unavailable. A principled formulation of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Jacob Adamczyk , Adam Kamoski , Rahul V. Kulkarni

Exploration is a major challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for high-dimensional domains that require function approximation. We propose exploration objectives -- policy optimization objectives that enable downstream maximization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Philip Amortila , Dylan J. Foster , Akshay Krishnamurthy

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Evan Zheran Liu , Kelvin Guu , Panupong Pasupat , Tianlin Shi , Percy Liang

Exploration in reinforcement learning is a challenging problem: in the worst case, the agent must search for high-reward states that could be hidden anywhere in the state space. Can we define a more tractable class of RL problems, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Kevin Li , Abhishek Gupta , Ashwin Reddy , Vitchyr Pong , Aurick Zhou , Justin Yu , Sergey Levine

Exploration bonuses in reinforcement learning guide long-horizon exploration by defining custom intrinsic objectives. Several exploration objectives like count-based bonuses, pseudo-counts, and state-entropy maximization are non-stationary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-24 Roger Creus Castanyer , Joshua Romoff , Glen Berseth

One of the open challenges in Reinforcement Learning is the hard exploration problem in sparse reward environments. Various types of intrinsic rewards have been proposed to address this challenge by pushing towards diversity. This diversity…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Aya Kayal , Eduardo Pignatelli , Laura Toni