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One of the remaining challenges in reinforcement learning is to develop agents that can generalise to novel scenarios they might encounter once deployed. This challenge is often framed in a multi-task setting where agents train on a fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-19 Max Weltevrede , Felix Kaubek , Matthijs T. J. Spaan , Wendelin Böhmer

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been proven its efficiency in capturing users' dynamic interests in recent literature. However, training a DRL agent is challenging, because of the sparse environment in recommender systems (RS), DRL…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Xiaocong Chen , Siyu Wang , Lina Yao , Lianyong Qi , Yong Li

Stemming on the idea that a key objective in reinforcement learning is to invert a target distribution of effects, end-effect drives are proposed as an effective way to implement goal-directed motor learning, in the absence of an explicit…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Emmanuel Daucé

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

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is widely used in task-oriented dialogue systems to optimize dialogue policy, but it struggles to balance exploration and exploitation due to the high dimensionality of state and action spaces. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Yangyang Zhao , Ben Niu , Libo Qin , Shihan Wang

Despite the rapid progress, LLMs for sequential decision-making (i.e., LLM agents) still struggle to produce diverse outputs. This leads to insufficient exploration, convergence to sub-optimal solutions, and becoming stuck in loops. Such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Priya Gurjar , Md Farhan Ishmam , Kenneth Marino

Deep reinforcement learning has been shown to be a powerful framework for learning policies from complex high-dimensional sensory inputs to actions in complex tasks, such as the Atari domain. In this paper, we explore output representation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-16 Ishan P. Durugkar , Clemens Rosenbaum , Stefan Dernbach , Sridhar Mahadevan

An effective approach to exploration in reinforcement learning is to rely on an agent's uncertainty over the optimal policy, which can yield near-optimal exploration strategies in tabular settings. However, in non-tabular settings that…

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

Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) extracts knowledge from previous tasks and achieves fast adaptation to new tasks. Despite recent progress, efficient exploration in meta-RL remains a key challenge in sparse-reward tasks, as it requires…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-15 Jin Zhang , Jianhao Wang , Hao Hu , Tong Chen , Yingfeng Chen , Changjie Fan , Chongjie Zhang

Exploration is a key problem in reinforcement learning, since agents can only learn from data they acquire in the environment. With that in mind, maintaining a population of agents is an attractive method, as it allows data be collected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Jack Parker-Holder , Aldo Pacchiano , Krzysztof Choromanski , Stephen Roberts

One of the challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL) is that the agent needs to trade off the exploration of the environment and the exploitation of the samples to optimize its behavior. Whether we optimize for regret, sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Jean Tarbouriech , Matteo Pirotta , Michal Valko , Alessandro Lazaric

The exploration--exploitation trade-off in reinforcement learning (RL) is a well-known and much-studied problem that balances greedy action selection with novel experience, and the study of exploration methods is usually only considered in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Jonathan C Balloch , Julia Kim , and Jessica L Inman , Mark O Riedl

Exploration has been a crucial part of reinforcement learning, yet several important questions concerning exploration efficiency are still not answered satisfactorily by existing analytical frameworks. These questions include exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-12-06 Liangpeng Zhang , Ke Tang , Xin Yao

Exploration is a crucial and distinctive aspect of reinforcement learning (RL) that remains a fundamental open problem. Several methods have been proposed to tackle this challenge. Commonly used methods inject random noise directly into the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Sebastian Griesbach , Carlo D'Eramo

Empowered by deep neural networks, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has demonstrated tremendous empirical successes in various domains, including games, health care, and autonomous driving. Despite these advancements, DRL is still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-22 Dayang Liang , Yaru Zhang , Yunlong Liu

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Ashvin Nair , Bob McGrew , Marcin Andrychowicz , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

Exploration strategy design is one of the challenging problems in reinforcement learning~(RL), especially when the environment contains a large state space or sparse rewards. During exploration, the agent tries to discover novel areas or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-07 Xiao Ma , Shen-Yi Zhao , Wu-Jun Li

Efficient reinforcement learning (RL) involves a trade-off between "exploitative" actions that maximise expected reward and "explorative'" ones that sample unvisited states. To encourage exploration, recent approaches proposed adding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-01 Changmin Yu , David Mguni , Dong Li , Aivar Sootla , Jun Wang , Neil Burgess

How to efficiently explore in reinforcement learning is an open problem. Many exploration algorithms employ the epistemic uncertainty of their own value predictions -- for instance to compute an exploration bonus or upper confidence bound.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Simon Schmitt , John Shawe-Taylor , Hado van Hasselt