Related papers: Goal-oriented Trajectories for Efficient Explorati…
Achieving efficient and scalable exploration in complex domains poses a major challenge in reinforcement learning. While Bayesian and PAC-MDP approaches to the exploration problem offer strong formal guarantees, they are often impractical…
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,…
Efficient exploration is an unsolved problem in Reinforcement Learning which is usually addressed by reactively rewarding the agent for fortuitously encountering novel situations. This paper introduces an efficient active exploration…
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,…
Curiosity has established itself as a powerful exploration strategy in deep reinforcement learning. Notably, leveraging expected future novelty as intrinsic motivation has been shown to efficiently generate exploratory trajectories, as well…
Exploration is one of the most important tasks in Reinforcement Learning, but it is not well-defined beyond finite problems in the Dynamic Programming paradigm (see Subsection 2.4). We provide a reinterpretation of exploration which can be…
Intrinsically motivated goal exploration processes enable agents to autonomously sample goals to explore efficiently complex environments with high-dimensional continuous actions. They have been applied successfully to real world robots to…
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…
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 (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…
Numerous past works have tackled the problem of task-driven navigation. But, how to effectively explore a new environment to enable a variety of down-stream tasks has received much less attention. In this work, we study how agents can…
Reinforcement learning algorithms rely on carefully engineering environment rewards that are extrinsic to the agent. However, annotating each environment with hand-designed, dense rewards is not scalable, motivating the need for developing…
In this paper we consider the problem of how a reinforcement learning agent that is tasked with solving a sequence of reinforcement learning problems (a sequence of Markov decision processes) can use knowledge acquired early in its lifetime…
We propose a reinforcement learning agent to solve hard exploration games by learning a range of directed exploratory policies. We construct an episodic memory-based intrinsic reward using k-nearest neighbors over the agent's recent…
Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is challenging because an agent can rarely obtain non-zero rewards and hence, gradient-based optimization of parameterized policies can be incremental and slow. Recent work demonstrated that using…
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…
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…
In this paper, we consider the problem of building learning agents that can efficiently learn to navigate in constrained environments. The main goal is to design agents that can efficiently learn to understand and generalize to different…
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…
Realistic environments often provide agents with very limited feedback. When the environment is initially unknown, the feedback, in the beginning, can be completely absent, and the agents may first choose to devote all their effort on…