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Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a strong alternative to solve optimization tasks efficiently. The use of these algorithms highly depends on the feedback signals provided by the environment in charge of informing about how good (or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Alain Andres , Esther Villar-Rodriguez , Javier Del Ser

While exploration in single-agent reinforcement learning has been studied extensively in recent years, considerably less work has focused on its counterpart in multi-agent reinforcement learning. To address this issue, this work proposes a…

In reinforcement learning, an agent interacts sequentially with an environment to maximize a reward, receiving only partial, probabilistic feedback. This creates a fundamental exploration-exploitation trade-off: the agent must explore to…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-27 Josep Lumbreras , Ruo Cheng Huang , Yanglin Hu , Marco Fanizza , Mile Gu

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to discover better actions through exploration. However, typical exploration techniques aim to maximize rewards, often incurring high costs in both exploration and learning processes. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Akane Tsuboya , Yu Kono , Tatsuji Takahashi

This paper reviews exploration techniques in deep reinforcement learning. Exploration techniques are of primary importance when solving sparse reward problems. In sparse reward problems, the reward is rare, which means that the agent will…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Pawel Ladosz , Lilian Weng , Minwoo Kim , Hyondong Oh

We propose a unified mechanism for achieving coordination and communication in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), through rewarding agents for having causal influence over other agents' actions. Causal influence is assessed using…

Effective exploration in reinforcement learning requires not only tracking where an agent has been, but also understanding how the agent perceives and represents the world. To learn powerful representations, an agent should actively explore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Faisal Mohamed , Catherine Ji , Benjamin Eysenbach , Glen Berseth

We consider an agent's uncertainty about its environment and the problem of generalizing this uncertainty across observations. Specifically, we focus on the problem of exploration in non-tabular reinforcement learning. Drawing inspiration…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-07-11 Marc G. Bellemare , Sriram Srinivasan , Georg Ostrovski , Tom Schaul , David Saxton , Remi Munos

Optimistic value estimates provide one mechanism for directed exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). The agent acts greedily with respect to an estimate of the value plus what can be seen as a value bonus. The value bonus can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Abdul Wahab , Raksha Kumaraswamy , Martha White

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning under safety requirements, in which an agent is trained to complete a given task, typically formalized as the maximization of a reward signal over time, while concurrently avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Tu-Hoa Pham , Giovanni De Magistris , Don Joven Agravante , Subhajit Chaudhury , Asim Munawar , Ryuki Tachibana

Exploration in complex domains is a key challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks with very sparse rewards. Recent successes in deep reinforcement learning have been achieved mostly using simple heuristic exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-07 Joshua Achiam , Shankar Sastry

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

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

The infamous exploration-exploitation dilemma is one of the oldest and most important problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Deliberate and effective exploration is necessary for RL agents to succeed in most environments. However, until…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-09 Suraj Narayanan Sasikumar

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for those tasks where rewards from environments are sparse. A commonly used approach for exploring such environments is to introduce some "intrinsic"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Neale Ratzlaff , Qinxun Bai , Li Fuxin , Wei Xu

Efficient exploration in deep reinforcement learning remains a fundamental challenge, especially in environments characterized by high-dimensional states and sparse rewards. Traditional exploration strategies that rely on random local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Stergios Plataniotis , Charilaos Akasiadis , Georgios Chalkiadakis

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

Many robotic tasks are composed of a lot of temporally correlated sub-tasks in a highly complex environment. It is important to discover situational intentions and proper actions by deliberating on temporal abstractions to solve problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Se-Wook Yoo , Seung-Woo Seo

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-20 Zhaohan Daniel Guo , Emma Brunskill

The challenge of developing powerful and general Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents has received increasing attention in recent years. Much of this effort has focused on the single-agent setting, in which an agent maximizes a predefined…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-21 Jiachen Yang , Ang Li , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Peter Sunehag , Edward Hughes , Hongyuan Zha