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The exploration-exploitation dilemma has been an intriguing and unsolved problem within the framework of reinforcement learning. "Optimism in the face of uncertainty" and model building play central roles in advanced exploration methods.…
We introduce exploration potential, a quantity that measures how much a reinforcement learning agent has explored its environment class. In contrast to information gain, exploration potential takes the problem's reward structure into…
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…
A central object of study in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is the Markovian policy, in which an agent's actions are chosen from a memoryless probability distribution, conditioned only on its current state. The family of Markovian policies is…
This work provides a rigorous framework for studying continuous time control problems in uncertain environments. The framework considered models uncertainty in state dynamics as a measure on the space of functions. This measure is…
Exploration has been a crucial part of reinforcement learning, yet several important questions concerning exploration efficiency are still not answered satisfactorily by existing analytical frameworks. These questions include exploration…
We study the problem of learning Markov decision processes with finite state and action spaces when the transition probability distributions and loss functions are chosen adversarially and are allowed to change with time. We introduce an…
We consider the challenge of finding a deterministic policy for a Markov decision process that uniformly (in all states) maximizes one reward subject to a probabilistic constraint over a different reward. Existing solutions do not fully…
We study a speculative trading problem within the exploratory reinforcement learning (RL) framework of Wang et al. [2020]. The problem is formulated as a sequential optimal stopping problem over entry and exit times under general utility…
This paper surveys the field of reinforcement learning from a computer-science perspective. It is written to be accessible to researchers familiar with machine learning. Both the historical basis of the field and a broad selection of…
We consider the problem of time-limited robotic exploration in previously unseen environments where exploration is limited by a predefined amount of time. We propose a novel exploration approach using learning-augmented model-based…
Cultures around the world show varying levels of conservatism. While maintaining traditional ideas prevents wrong ones from being embraced, it also slows or prevents adaptation to new times. Without exploration there can be no improvement,…
This paper introduces an algorithm for discovering implicit and delayed causal relations between events observed by a robot at arbitrary times, with the objective of improving data-efficiency and interpretability of model-based…
We study planning problems faced by robots operating in uncertain environments with incomplete knowledge of state, and actions that are noisy and/or imprecise. This paper identifies a new problem sub-class that models settings in which…
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…
Reinforcement learning agents need exploratory behaviors to escape from local optima. These behaviors may include both immediate dithering perturbation and temporally consistent exploration. To achieve these, a stochastic policy model that…
A growing body of computational studies shows that simple machine learning agents converge to cooperative behaviors in social dilemmas, such as collusive price-setting in oligopoly markets, raising questions about what drives this outcome.…
We propose and analyze a continuous-time robust reinforcement learning framework for optimal stopping under ambiguity. In this framework, an agent chooses a robust exploratory stopping time motivated by two objectives: robust…
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…
We consider long-lived agents who interact repeatedly in a social network. In each period, each agent learns about an unknown state by observing a private signal and her neighbors' actions from the previous period before choosing her own…