English
Related papers

Related papers: EMI: Exploration with Mutual Information

200 papers

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Simone Parisi , Davide Tateo , Maximilian Hensel , Carlo D'Eramo , Jan Peters , Joni Pajarinen

This paper proposes a novel method that incorporates empowerment when reasoning actions in reinforcement learning (RL), thereby achieving the flexibility of exploration-exploitation dilemma (EED). In previous methods, empowerment for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Taisuke Kobayashi

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically necessitate extensive exploration of the state space to find optimal policies. However, in safety-critical applications, the risks associated with such exploration can lead to catastrophic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Kaustubh Mani , Vincent Mai , Charlie Gauthier , Annie Chen , Samer Nashed , Liam Paull

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Pierre Ménard , Omar Darwiche Domingues , Anders Jonsson , Emilie Kaufmann , Edouard Leurent , Michal Valko

The Exploration-Exploitation tradeoff arises in Reinforcement Learning when one cannot tell if a policy is optimal. Then, there is a constant need to explore new actions instead of exploiting past experience. In practice, it is common to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Lior Shani , Yonathan Efroni , Shie Mannor

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-14 Yuri Burda , Harri Edwards , Deepak Pathak , Amos Storkey , Trevor Darrell , Alexei A. Efros

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved great strides in solving challenging motion control tasks. Recently, there has been significant work on methods for exploiting the data gathered during training, but there has been less work on how…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-04-13 Glen Berseth , Michiel van de Panne

Efficient reinforcement learning (RL) involves a trade-off between "exploitative" actions that maximise expected reward and "explorative'" ones that sample unvisited states. To encourage exploration, recent approaches proposed adding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-01 Changmin Yu , David Mguni , Dong Li , Aivar Sootla , Jun Wang , Neil Burgess

Reinforcement learning is commonly applied in residential energy management, particularly for optimizing energy costs. However, RL agents often face challenges when dealing with deceptive and sparse rewards in the energy control domain,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Junlin Lu , Patrick Mannion , Karl Mason

Robotic manipulation stands as a largely unsolved problem despite significant advances in robotics and machine learning in recent years. One of the key challenges in manipulation is the exploration of the dynamics of the environment when…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Tim Schneider , Boris Belousov , Georgia Chalvatzaki , Diego Romeres , Devesh K. Jha , Jan Peters

Collaborative multi-agent exploration of unknown environments is crucial for search and rescue operations. Effective real-world deployment must address challenges such as limited inter-agent communication and static and dynamic obstacles.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Gabriele Calzolari , Vidya Sumathy , Christoforos Kanellakis , George Nikolakopoulos

Reinforcement learning systems rely on environment interfaces that specify observations and reward functions, yet constructing these interfaces for new tasks often requires substantial manual effort. While recent work has automated reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Akshat Singh Jaswal , Ashish Baghel , Paras Chopra

This paper investigates whether learning contingency-awareness and controllable aspects of an environment can lead to better exploration in reinforcement learning. To investigate this question, we consider an instantiation of this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-05 Jongwook Choi , Yijie Guo , Marcin Moczulski , Junhyuk Oh , Neal Wu , Mohammad Norouzi , Honglak Lee

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-19 Jean Tarbouriech , Matteo Pirotta , Michal Valko , Alessandro Lazaric

Collaborative multiple robots for unknown environment exploration have become mainstream due to their remarkable performance and efficiency. However, most existing methods assume perfect robots' communication during exploration, which is…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Khattiya Pongsirijinda , Zhiqiang Cao , Billy Pik Lik Lau , Ran Liu , Chau Yuen , U-Xuan Tan

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to balance exploiting the current best strategy with exploring new options that could lead to higher rewards. Most common RL algorithms use undirected exploration, i.e., select random sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Bhavya Sukhija , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause , Pieter Abbeel , Carmelo Sferrazza

We present a modular approach to reinforcement learning that uses a Bayesian representation of the uncertainty over models. The approach, BOSS (Best of Sampled Set), drives exploration by sampling multiple models from the posterior and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-05-14 John Asmuth , Lihong Li , Michael L. Littman , Ali Nouri , David Wingate

A promising technique for exploration is to maximize the entropy of visited state distribution, i.e., state entropy, by encouraging uniform coverage of visited state space. While it has been effective for an unsupervised setup, it tends to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Dongyoung Kim , Jinwoo Shin , Pieter Abbeel , Younggyo Seo

Reward Machines (RMs) are an established mechanism in Reinforcement Learning (RL) to represent and learn sparse, temporally extended tasks with non-Markovian rewards. RMs rely on high-level information in the form of labels that are emitted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Thomas Krug , Daniel Neider

Automatic prompt engineering aims to enhance the generation quality of large language models (LLMs). Recent works utilize feedbacks generated from erroneous cases to guide the prompt optimization. During inference, they may further retrieve…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Cilin Yan , Jingyun Wang , Lin Zhang , Ruihui Zhao , Xiaopu Wu , Kai Xiong , Qingsong Liu , Guoliang Kang , Yangyang Kang