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The study of exploration in the domain of decision making has a long history but remains actively debated. From the vast literature that addressed this topic for decades under various points of view (e.g., developmental psychology,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-14 Léonard Hussenot , Robert Dadashi , Matthieu Geist , Olivier Pietquin

Recent work on exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) has led to a series of increasingly complex solutions to the problem. This increase in complexity often comes at the expense of generality. Recent empirical studies suggest that,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-03 Will Dabney , Georg Ostrovski , André Barreto

In distributional reinforcement learning (RL), the estimated distribution of value function models both the parametric and intrinsic uncertainties. We propose a novel and efficient exploration method for deep RL that has two components. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-16 Borislav Mavrin , Shangtong Zhang , Hengshuai Yao , Linglong Kong , Kaiwen Wu , Yaoliang Yu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful framework for decision-making in uncertain environments, but it often requires large amounts of data to learn an optimal policy. We address this challenge by incorporating prior model knowledge to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 J. S. van Hulst , W. P. M. H. Heemels , D. J. Antunes

We present a new model-based algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) which consists of explicit exploration and exploitation phases, and is applicable in large or infinite state spaces. The algorithm maintains a set of dynamics models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Mikael Henaff

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) powered by neural net approximation of the Q function has had enormous empirical success. While the theory of RL has traditionally focused on linear function approximation (or eluder dimension) approaches,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Baihe Huang , Kaixuan Huang , Sham M. Kakade , Jason D. Lee , Qi Lei , Runzhe Wang , Jiaqi Yang

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

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular machine learning paradigm where intelligent agents interact with the environment to fulfill a long-term goal. Driven by the resurgence of deep learning, Deep RL (DRL) has witnessed great success over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Yunpeng Qing , Shunyu Liu , Jie Song , Yang Zhou , Kaixuan Chen , Huiqiong Wang , Mingli Song

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is known to be often unsuccessful in environments with sparse extrinsic rewards. A possible countermeasure is to endow RL agents with an intrinsic reward function, or 'intrinsic motivation', which rewards the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Francesco Massari , Martin Biehl , Lisa Meeden , Ryota Kanai

Exploration algorithms for reinforcement learning typically replace or augment the reward function with an additional ``intrinsic'' reward that trains the agent to seek previously unseen states of the environment. Here, we consider an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Kevin McKee , Eric Alt , Andrew Grebenisan , Mick van Gelderen , Gary Miguel

Existing exploration strategies in reinforcement learning (RL) often either ignore the history or feedback of search, or are complicated to implement. There is also a very limited literature showing their effectiveness over diverse domains.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Xing Wang , Alexander Vinel

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) has drawn increasing interests in recent years due to its tremendous success in various applications. However, standard RL algorithms can only be applied for single reward function, and cannot adapt to an unseen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Ziyang Tang , Yihao Feng , Qiang Liu

This paper reviews exploration techniques in deep reinforcement learning. Exploration techniques are of primary importance when solving sparse reward problems. In sparse reward problems, the reward is rare, which means that the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Pawel Ladosz , Lilian Weng , Minwoo Kim , Hyondong Oh

Navigating and understanding complex and unknown environments autonomously demands more than just basic perception and movement from embodied agents. Truly effective exploration requires agents to possess higher-level cognitive abilities,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Abdel Hakim Drid , Vincenzo Suriani , Daniele Nardi , Abderrezzak Debilou

Reinforcement learning systems are often concerned with balancing exploration of untested actions against exploitation of actions that are known to be good. The benefit of exploration can be estimated using the classical notion of Value of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-30 Richard Dearden , Nir Friedman , David Andre

Exploration is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), and its effectiveness is a deciding factor in the performance of RL algorithms, especially when facing sparse extrinsic rewards. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Shanchuan Wan , Yujin Tang , Yingtao Tian , Tomoyuki Kaneko

Safe and efficient autonomous driving maneuvers in an interactive and complex environment can be considerably challenging due to the unpredictable actions of other surrounding agents that may be cooperative or adversarial in their…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-01-28 Pin Wang , Ching-Yao Chan , Hanhan Li

In lifelong learning, an agent learns throughout its entire life without resets, in a constantly changing environment, as we humans do. Consequently, lifelong learning comes with a plethora of research problems such as continual domain…

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