English
Related papers

Related papers: Goal-oriented Trajectories for Efficient Explorati…

200 papers

Efficient exploration is one of the key challenges for reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Most traditional sample efficiency bounds require strategic exploration. Recently many deep RL algorithms with simple heuristic exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-19 Yao Liu , Emma Brunskill

In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning-based algorithm for trajectory optimization for constrained dynamical systems. This problem is motivated by the fact that for most robotic systems, the dynamics may not always be known.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-05 Kei Ota , Devesh K. Jha , Tomoaki Oiki , Mamoru Miura , Takashi Nammoto , Daniel Nikovski , Toshisada Mariyama

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Caleb Ju , Guanghui Lan

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents often struggle with inefficient exploration, particularly in environments with sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies can lead to slow learning and suboptimal performance because agents fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Gaurav Chaudhary , Laxmidhar Behera , Washim Uddin Mondal

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Philippe Morere , Fabio Ramos

For sophisticated reinforcement learning (RL) systems to interact usefully with real-world environments, we need to communicate complex goals to these systems. In this work, we explore goals defined in terms of (non-expert) human…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-20 Paul Christiano , Jan Leike , Tom B. Brown , Miljan Martic , Shane Legg , Dario Amodei

Exploration in high-dimensional, continuous spaces with sparse rewards is an open problem in reinforcement learning. Artificial curiosity algorithms address this by creating rewards that lead to exploration. Given a reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Alexander Nedergaard , Matthew Cook

Modern recommendation systems rely on exploration to learn user preferences for new items, typically implementing uniform exploration policies (e.g., epsilon-greedy) due to their simplicity and compatibility with machine learning (ML)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Ethan Che , Hakan Ceylan , James McInerney , Nathan Kallus

Exploration is a crucial aspect of bandit and reinforcement learning algorithms. The uncertainty quantification necessary for exploration often comes from either closed-form expressions based on simple models or resampling and posterior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-07 James McInerney , Nathan Kallus

Exploration in environments with sparse feedback remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning (RL). When the RL agent explores the environment randomly, it results in low exploration efficiency, especially in robotic…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Boyao Li , Tao Lu , Jiayi Li , Ning Lu , Yinghao Cai , Shuo Wang

In recent years, state-of-the-art game-playing agents often involve policies that are trained in self-playing processes where Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithms and trained policies iteratively improve each other. The strongest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-16 Dennis J. N. J. Soemers , Éric Piette , Matthew Stephenson , Cameron Browne

$\varepsilon$-greedy is a policy used to balance exploration and exploitation in many reinforcement learning setting. In cases where the agent uses some on-policy algorithm to learn optimal behaviour, it makes sense for the agent to explore…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-10-31 Aakash Maroti

Boltzmann exploration is a classic strategy for sequential decision-making under uncertainty, and is one of the most standard tools in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Despite its widespread use, there is virtually no theoretical understanding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi , Claudio Gentile , Gábor Lugosi , Gergely Neu

Reinforcement learning agents need a reward signal to learn successful policies. When this signal is sparse or the corresponding gradient is deceptive, such agents need a dedicated mechanism to efficiently explore their search space without…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Alexandre Chenu , Nicolas Perrin-Gilbert , Stéphane Doncieux , Olivier Sigaud

Exploration is an essential part of reinforcement learning, which restricts the quality of learned policy. Hard-exploration environments are defined by huge state space and sparse rewards. In such conditions, an exhaustive exploration of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-22 Leonid Ugadiarov , Alexey Skrynnik , Aleksandr I. Panov

Meta-Reinforcement learning approaches aim to develop learning procedures that can adapt quickly to a distribution of tasks with the help of a few examples. Developing efficient exploration strategies capable of finding the most useful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Swaminathan Gurumurthy , Sumit Kumar , Katia Sycara

We consider a team of reinforcement learning agents that concurrently learn to operate in a common environment. We identify three properties - adaptivity, commitment, and diversity - which are necessary for efficient coordinated exploration…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-12-18 Maria Dimakopoulou , Benjamin Van Roy

Recent advances in vision-based navigation and exploration have shown impressive capabilities in photorealistic indoor environments. However, these methods still struggle with long-horizon tasks and require large amounts of data to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-08-25 Fabian Schmalstieg , Daniel Honerkamp , Tim Welschehold , Abhinav Valada

The performance of off-policy learning, including deep Q-learning and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG), critically depends on the choice of the exploration policy. Existing exploration methods are mostly based on adding noise to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-28 Tianbing Xu , Qiang Liu , Liang Zhao , Jian Peng

Text-based games -- in which an agent interacts with the world through textual natural language -- present us with the problem of combinatorially-sized action-spaces. Most current reinforcement learning algorithms are not capable of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-21 Prithviraj Ammanabrolu , Ethan Tien , Zhaochen Luo , Mark O. Riedl