Related papers: Depth and nonlinearity induce implicit exploration…
Intrinsic motivation enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to explore when rewards are very sparse, where traditional exploration heuristics such as Boltzmann or e-greedy would typically fail. However, intrinsic exploration is…
Reward maximization, safe exploration, and intrinsic motivation are often studied as separate objectives in reinforcement learning (RL). We present a unified geometric framework, that views these goals as instances of a single optimization…
Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…
Efficient exploration is necessary to achieve good sample efficiency for reinforcement learning in general. From small, tabular settings such as gridworlds to large, continuous and sparse reward settings such as robotic object manipulation…
This paper provides a theoretical study of deep neural function approximation in reinforcement learning (RL) with the $\epsilon$-greedy exploration under the online setting. This problem setting is motivated by the successful deep…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the three basic paradigms of machine learning. It has demonstrated impressive performance in many complex tasks like Go and StarCraft, which is increasingly involved in smart manufacturing and…
Exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) remains an open challenge. RL algorithms rely on observing rewards to train the agent, and if informative rewards are sparse the agent learns slowly or may not learn at all. To improve exploration…
We propose Deep Q-Networks (DQN) with model-based exploration, an algorithm combining both model-free and model-based approaches that explores better and learns environments with sparse rewards more efficiently. DQN is a general-purpose,…
The central tenet of reinforcement learning (RL) is that agents seek to maximize the sum of cumulative rewards. In contrast, active inference, an emerging framework within cognitive and computational neuroscience, proposes that agents act…
Model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular learning paradigm due to its potential sample efficiency compared to model-free RL. However, existing empirical model-based RL approaches lack the ability to explore. This work studies a…
Exploration in an unknown environment is the core functionality for mobile robots. Learning-based exploration methods, including convolutional neural networks, provide excellent strategies without human-designed logic for the feature…
The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…
This paper investigates exploration strategies of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods to learn navigation policies for mobile robots. In particular, we augment the normal external reward for training DRL algorithms with intrinsic…
Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…
Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated notable progress in sample efficiency, spanning both model-based and model-free paradigms. Despite the identification and mitigation of specific bottlenecks in prior…
Offline reinforcement learning requires reconciling two conflicting aims: learning a policy that improves over the behavior policy that collected the dataset, while at the same time minimizing the deviation from the behavior policy so as to…
Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims at learning an optimal control from a fixed dataset, without interactions with the system. An agent in this setting should avoid selecting actions whose consequences cannot be predicted from the…
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…
Incomplete knowledge of the environment leads an agent to make decisions under uncertainty. One of the major dilemmas in Reinforcement Learning (RL) where an autonomous agent has to balance two contrasting needs in making its decisions is:…
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…