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Deep reinforcement learning has enabled human-level or even super-human performance in various types of games. However, the amount of exploration required for learning is often quite large. Deep reinforcement learning also has super-human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Akane Minami , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi

Traditional exploration methods in RL require agents to perform random actions to find rewards. But these approaches struggle on sparse-reward domains like Montezuma's Revenge where the probability that any random action sequence leads to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-11-27 Christopher Stanton , Jeff Clune

In reinforcement learning (RL), an agent must explore an initially unknown environment in order to learn a desired behaviour. When RL agents are deployed in real world environments, safety is of primary concern. Constrained Markov decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 David M. Bossens , Nicholas Bishop

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) exploits temporally extended actions, or options, to make decisions from a higher-dimensional perspective to alleviate the sparse reward problem, one of the most challenging problems in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Libo Xing

We study algorithms for average-cost reinforcement learning problems with value function approximation. Our starting point is the recently proposed POLITEX algorithm, a version of policy iteration where the policy produced in each iteration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-29 Yasin Abbasi-Yadkori , Nevena Lazic , Csaba Szepesvari , Gellert Weisz

Achieving effective test-time scaling requires models to engage in In-Context Exploration -- the intrinsic ability to generate, verify, and refine multiple reasoning hypotheses within a single continuous context. Grounded in State Coverage…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Futing Wang , Jianhao Yan , Yun Luo , Ganqu Cui , Zhi Wang , Xiaoye Qu , Yue Zhang , Yu Cheng , Tao Lin

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is the design of exploration strategies, especially for environments with sparse reward structures and continuous state and action spaces. Intuitively, if the reinforcement signal is very scarce,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Susan Amin , Maziar Gomrokchi , Hossein Aboutalebi , Harsh Satija , Doina Precup

Offline Reinforcement Learning (ORL) enablesus to separately study the two interlinked processes of reinforcement learning: collecting informative experience and inferring optimal behaviour. The second step has been widely studied in the…

In robot manipulation, Reinforcement Learning (RL) often suffers from low sample efficiency and uncertain convergence, especially in large observation and action spaces. Foundation Models (FMs) offer an alternative, demonstrating promise in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Runyu Ma , Jelle Luijkx , Zlatan Ajanovic , Jens Kober

Maximum entropy reinforcement learning motivates agents to explore states and actions to maximize the entropy of some distribution, typically by providing additional intrinsic rewards proportional to that entropy function. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

Exploration in environments with sparse feedback remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning (RL). When the RL agent explores the environment randomly, it results in low exploration efficiency, especially in robotic…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Boyao Li , Tao Lu , Jiayi Li , Ning Lu , Yinghao Cai , Shuo Wang

Equipping artificial agents with useful exploration mechanisms remains a challenge to this day. Humans, on the other hand, seem to manage the trade-off between exploration and exploitation effortlessly. In the present article, we put…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Marcel Binz , Eric Schulz

Exploration remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in environments with sparse or adversarial reward structures. In this work, we study how the architecture of deep neural policies implicitly shapes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-28 Jacob Adamczyk

We study the infinite-horizon average-reward reinforcement learning (RL) for continuous space Lipschitz MDPs in which an agent can play policies from a given set $\Phi$. The proposed algorithms efficiently explore the policy space by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Avik Kar , Rahul Singh

Efficient exploration in reinforcement learning is a challenging problem commonly addressed through intrinsic rewards. Recent prominent approaches are based on state novelty or variants of artificial curiosity. However, directly applying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Aditya Ramesh , Louis Kirsch , Sjoerd van Steenkiste , Jürgen Schmidhuber

Reinforcement learning (RL) combines a control problem with statistical estimation: The system dynamics are not known to the agent, but can be learned through experience. A recent line of research casts `RL as inference' and suggests a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-05 Brendan O'Donoghue , Ian Osband , Catalin Ionescu

In this paper, a unified framework for exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) is proposed based on an option-critic model. The proposed framework learns to integrate a set of diverse exploration strategies so that the agent can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Woojun Kim , Jeonghye Kim , Youngchul Sung

Motivated by the prevailing paradigm of using unsupervised learning for efficient exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) problems [tang2017exploration,bellemare2016unifying], we investigate when this paradigm is provably efficient. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Fei Feng , Ruosong Wang , Wotao Yin , Simon S. Du , Lin F. Yang

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents are particularly hard to train when rewards are sparse. One common solution is to use intrinsic rewards to encourage agents to explore their environment. However, recent intrinsic exploration methods often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Jesse Mu , Victor Zhong , Roberta Raileanu , Minqi Jiang , Noah Goodman , Tim Rocktäschel , Edward Grefenstette

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms have been shown to learn complex tasks using highly general policy classes. However, sparse reward problems remain a significant challenge. Exploration methods based on novelty detection have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-30 Justin Fu , John D. Co-Reyes , Sergey Levine