Related papers: Approximate Exploration through State Abstraction
All reinforcement learning algorithms must handle the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Many state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning methods use noise in the action selection, such as Gaussian noise in policy gradient…
One of the challenges in online reinforcement learning (RL) is that the agent needs to trade off the exploration of the environment and the exploitation of the samples to optimize its behavior. Whether we optimize for regret, sample…
Achieving effective test-time scaling requires models to engage in In-Context Exploration -- the intrinsic ability to generate, verify, and refine multiple reasoning hypotheses within a single continuous context. Grounded in State Coverage…
Exploration is an extremely challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially in high dimensional state and action spaces and when only sparse rewards are available. Effective representations can indicate which components of the…
Exploration is essential in reinforcement learning, particularly in environments where external rewards are sparse. Here we focus on exploration with intrinsic rewards, where the agent transiently augments the external rewards with…
Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to expand the capabilities of language models, but it is unclear if current RL techniques promote the discovery of novel behaviors, or simply sharpen those already present in the base model. In this…
Imitation learning is a central problem in reinforcement learning where the goal is to learn a policy that mimics the expert's behavior. In practice, it is often challenging to learn the expert policy from a limited number of demonstrations…
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is appealing because (i) it enables planning and thus more strategic exploration, and (ii) by decoupling dynamics from rewards, it enables fast transfer to new reward functions. However, learning an…
Exploration is a crucial skill for in-context reinforcement learning in unknown environments. However, it remains unclear if large language models can effectively explore a partially hidden state space. This work isolates exploration as the…
Exploration is a key problem in reinforcement learning. Recently bonus-based methods have achieved considerable successes in environments where exploration is difficult such as Montezuma's Revenge, which assign additional bonuses (e.g.,…
A well-balanced exploration-exploitation trade-off is crucial for successful acquisition functions in Bayesian optimization. However, there is a lack of quantitative measures for exploration, making it difficult to analyze and compare…
Sparse reward environments are known to be challenging for reinforcement learning agents. In such environments, efficient and scalable exploration is crucial. Exploration is a means by which an agent gains information about the environment.…
While in general trading off exploration and exploitation in reinforcement learning is hard, under some formulations relatively simple solutions exist. In this paper, we first derive upper bounds for the utility of selecting different…
Abstraction is crucial for effective sequential decision making in domains with large state spaces. In this work, we propose an information bottleneck method for learning approximate bisimulations, a type of state abstraction. We use a deep…
Reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when the reward signal is very sparse. In these cases, naive random exploration methods essentially rely on a random walk to stumble onto a rewarding state. Recent works utilize intrinsic…
While the difficulty of reinforcement learning problems is typically related to the complexity of their state spaces, Abstraction proposes that solutions often lie in simpler underlying latent spaces. Prior works have focused on learning…
In the face of difficult exploration problems in reinforcement learning, we study whether giving an agent an object-centric mapping (describing a set of items and their attributes) allow for more efficient learning. We found this problem is…
Many reinforcement learning exploration techniques are overly optimistic and try to explore every state. Such exploration is impossible in environments with the unlimited number of states. I propose to use simulated exploration with an…
Efficient exploration is necessary to achieve good sample efficiency for reinforcement learning in general. From small, tabular settings such as gridworlds to large, continuous and sparse reward settings such as robotic object manipulation…
Two desiderata of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are the ability to learn from relatively little experience and the ability to learn policies that generalize to a range of problem specifications. In factored state spaces, one…