English
Related papers

Related papers: Depth and nonlinearity induce implicit exploration…

200 papers

Balancing exploration and exploitation is a fundamental part of reinforcement learning, yet most state-of-the-art algorithms use a naive exploration protocol like $\epsilon$-greedy. This contributes to the problem of high sample complexity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Tom Blau , Lionel Ott , Fabio Ramos

Deep Research agents tackle knowledge-intensive tasks through multi-round retrieval and decision-oriented generation. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been shown to improve performance in this paradigm, its contributions remain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yinuo Xu , Shuo Lu , Jianjie Cheng , Meng Wang , Qianlong Xie , Xingxing Wang , Ran He , Jian Liang

We present Q-chunking, a simple yet effective recipe for improving reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for long-horizon, sparse-reward tasks. Our recipe is designed for the offline-to-online RL setting, where the goal is to leverage an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Qiyang Li , Zhiyuan Zhou , Sergey Levine

In this paper, we explore deep reinforcement learning algorithms for vision-based robotic grasping. Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to a range of challenging environments, but the proliferation of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-03-30 Deirdre Quillen , Eric Jang , Ofir Nachum , Chelsea Finn , Julian Ibarz , Sergey Levine

We show that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can elicit strong mathematical reasoning in certain language models even with spurious rewards that have little, no, or even negative correlation with the correct answer.…

One of the gnarliest challenges in reinforcement learning (RL) is exploration that scales to vast domains, where novelty-, or coverage-seeking behaviour falls short. Goal-directed, purposeful behaviours are able to overcome this, but rely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Akhil Bagaria , Ray Jiang , Ramana Kumar , Tom Schaul

In recent years, $Q$-learning has become indispensable for model-free reinforcement learning (MFRL). However, it suffers from well-known problems such as under- and overestimation bias of the value, which may adversely affect the policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Youngmin Oh , Jinwoo Shin , Eunho Yang , Sung Ju Hwang

Exploration is an essential component of reinforcement learning algorithms, where agents need to learn how to predict and control unknown and often stochastic environments. Reinforcement learning agents depend crucially on exploration to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Susan Amin , Maziar Gomrokchi , Harsh Satija , Herke van Hoof , Doina Precup

In this paper, we investigate preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), which enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn from human feedback. This is particularly valuable when defining a fine-grain reward function is not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Guojian Wang , Jianxiang Liu , Xinyuan Li , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Tianyuan Chen , Xuyang Chen

Potential-based reward shaping is commonly used to incorporate prior knowledge of how to solve the task into reinforcement learning because it can formally guarantee policy invariance. As such, the optimal policy and the ordering of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Henrik Müller , Daniel Kudenko

Deep reinforcement learning is a technique for solving problems in a variety of environments, ranging from Atari video games to stock trading. This method leverages deep neural network models to make decisions based on observations of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Anthony Dowling

Ensuring sufficient exploration is a central challenge when training meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) agents to solve novel environments. Conventional solutions to the exploration-exploitation dilemma inject explicit incentives such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Micah Rentschler , Jesse Roberts

Exploration in unknown environments is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning and control. In this work, we study task-guided exploration and determine what precisely an agent must learn about their environment in order to complete…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Andrew Wagenmaker , Max Simchowitz , Kevin Jamieson

The successes of reinforcement learning in recent years are underpinned by the characterization of suitable reward functions. However, in settings where such rewards are non-intuitive, difficult to define, or otherwise error-prone in their…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Mohammad Afzal , Sankalp Gambhir , Ashutosh Gupta , Krishna S , Ashutosh Trivedi , Alvaro Velasquez

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Viraj Mehta , Ian Char , Joseph Abbate , Rory Conlin , Mark D. Boyer , Stefano Ermon , Jeff Schneider , Willie Neiswanger

Decision making in uncertain and risky environments is a prominent area of research. Standard economic theories fail to fully explain human behaviour, while a potentially promising alternative may lie in the direction of Reinforcement…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2016-09-21 Alvin Pastore , Umberto Esposito , Eleni Vasilaki

Reinforcement Learning enables to train an agent via interaction with the environment. However, in the majority of real-world scenarios, the extrinsic feedback is sparse or not sufficient, thus intrinsic reward formulations are needed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Patrik Reizinger , Márton Szemenyei

Bayesian reinforcement learning (RL) offers a principled and elegant approach for sequential decision making under uncertainty. Most notably, Bayesian agents do not face an exploration/exploitation dilemma, a major pathology of frequentist…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Mattie Fellows , Brandon Kaplowitz , Christian Schroeder de Witt , Shimon Whiteson

Reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome-based rewards has proven effective for improving large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, its success often depends on the base model occasionally sampling correct solutions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jatin Prakash , Anirudh Buvanesh

Trajectory adjustment decisions throughout the drilling process, called geosteering, affect subsequent choices and information gathering, thus resulting in a coupled sequential decision problem. Previous works on applying decision…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Ressi Bonti Muhammad , Sergey Alyaev , Reidar Brumer Bratvold