English
Related papers

Related papers: Approximate Exploration through State Abstraction

200 papers

Language model alignment (or, reinforcement learning) techniques that leverage active exploration -- deliberately encouraging the model to produce diverse, informative responses -- offer the promise of super-human capabilities. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Dylan J. Foster , Zakaria Mhammedi , Dhruv Rohatgi

Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Max Simchowitz , Tiancheng Yu

A new approach to inference in state space models is proposed, based on approximate Bayesian computation (ABC). ABC avoids evaluation of the likelihood function by matching observed summary statistics with statistics computed from data…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-10-01 Gael M. Martin , Brendan P. M. McCabe , Worapree Maneesoonthorn , Christian P. Robert

Safe exploration aims at addressing the limitations of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in safety-critical scenarios, where failures during trial-and-error learning may incur high costs. Several methods exist to incorporate external knowledge or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Xiaotong Ji , Antonio Filieri

Sequential decision making techniques hold great promise to improve the performance of many real-world systems, but computational complexity hampers their principled application. Influence-based abstraction aims to gain leverage by modeling…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Elena Congeduti , Alexander Mey , Frans A. Oliehoek

Accelerating exploration in visual reinforcement learning under sparse rewards remains challenging due to the substantial task-irrelevant variations. Despite advances in intrinsic exploration, many methods either assume access to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Dayang Liang , Ruihan Liu , Lipeng Wan , Yunlong Liu , Bo An

Proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm is a deep reinforcement learning algorithm with outstanding performance, especially in continuous control tasks. But the performance of this method is still affected by its exploration ability.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Junwei Zhang , Zhenghao Zhang , Shuai Han , Shuai Lü

In online reinforcement learning (RL), efficient exploration remains particularly challenging in high-dimensional environments with sparse rewards. In low-dimensional environments, where tabular parameterization is possible, count-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-21 Tianjun Zhang , Paria Rashidinejad , Jiantao Jiao , Yuandong Tian , Joseph Gonzalez , Stuart Russell

Existing approaches for improving generalization in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have mostly focused on representation learning, neglecting RL-specific aspects such as exploration. We hypothesize that the agent's exploration strategy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Yiding Jiang , J. Zico Kolter , Roberta Raileanu

Within the framework of probably approximately correct Markov decision processes (PAC-MDP), much theoretical work has focused on methods to attain near optimality after a relatively long period of learning and exploration. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-04-06 Kenji Kawaguchi

One of the main challenges in reinforcement learning is solving tasks with sparse reward. We show that the difficulty of discovering a distant rewarding state in an MDP is bounded by the expected cover time of a random walk over the graph…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-03-19 Yuu Jinnai , Jee Won Park , David Abel , George Konidaris

We present an algorithm, HOMER, for exploration and reinforcement learning in rich observation environments that are summarizable by an unknown latent state space. The algorithm interleaves representation learning to identify a new notion…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-15 Dipendra Misra , Mikael Henaff , Akshay Krishnamurthy , John Langford

We are often interested in identifying the feasible subset of a decision space under multiple constraints to permit effective design exploration. If determining feasibility required computationally expensive simulations, the cost of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Alma Rahat , Michael Wood

In many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL), performing actions requires consuming certain types of resources that are non-replenishable in each episode. Typical applications include robotic control with limited energy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Zhihai Wang , Taoxing Pan , Qi Zhou , Jie Wang

We propose a practical integration of logical state abstraction with AIXI, a Bayesian optimality notion for reinforcement learning agents, to significantly expand the model class that AIXI agents can be approximated over to complex…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Samuel Yang-Zhao , Tianyu Wang , Kee Siong Ng

Pseudo-count is an effective anti-exploration method in offline reinforcement learning (RL) by counting state-action pairs and imposing a large penalty on rare or unseen state-action pair data. Existing anti-exploration methods count…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Long Chen , Yinkui Liu , Shen Li , Bo Tang , Xuemin Hu

One of the bottlenecks preventing Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms (DRL) from real-world applications is how to explore the environment and collect informative transitions efficiently. The present paper describes bounded exploration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Ting Qiao , Henry Williams , David Valencia , Bruce MacDonald

Active learning provides a framework to adaptively query the most informative experiments towards learning an unknown black-box function. Various approaches of active learning have been proposed in the literature, however, they either focus…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Upala Junaida Islam , Kamran Paynabar , George Runger , Ashif Sikandar Iquebal

A basic simulation-based reinforcement learning algorithm is the Monte Carlo Exploring States (MCES) method, also known as optimistic policy iteration, in which the value function is approximated by simulated returns and a greedy policy is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-22 Jun Liu

Although exploratory behaviors are ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, their computational underpinnings are still largely unknown. Behavioral Psychology has identified learning as a primary drive underlying many exploratory behaviors.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-12-14 Daniel Y. Little , Friedrich T. Sommer