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Related papers: Model-Based Active Exploration

200 papers

Efficient exploration remains a challenging research problem in reinforcement learning, especially when an environment contains large state spaces, deceptive local optima, or sparse rewards. To tackle this problem, we present a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Zhang-Wei Hong , Tzu-Yun Shann , Shih-Yang Su , Yi-Hsiang Chang , Chun-Yi Lee

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Tim Grams , Patrick Betz , Sascha Marton , Stefan Lüdtke , Christian Bartelt

State of the art reinforcement learning has enabled training agents on tasks of ever increasing complexity. However, the current paradigm tends to favor training agents from scratch on every new task or on collections of tasks with a view…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-09 Jacob Walker , Eszter Vértes , Yazhe Li , Gabriel Dulac-Arnold , Ankesh Anand , Théophane Weber , Jessica B. Hamrick

Online model-free reinforcement learning (RL) methods with continuous actions are playing a prominent role when dealing with real-world applications such as Robotics. However, when confronted to non-stationary environments, these methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-07 Mehdi Khamassi , Costas Tzafestas

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically consider discrete-time dynamics, even though the underlying systems are often continuous in time. In this paper, we introduce a model-based reinforcement learning algorithm that represents…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Lenart Treven , Jonas Hübotter , Bhavya Sukhija , Florian Dörfler , Andreas Krause

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

Given access to accurate dynamical models, modern planning approaches are effective in computing feasible and optimal plans for repetitive robotic tasks. However, it is difficult to model the true dynamics of the real world before…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Anirudh Vemula , J. Andrew Bagnell , Maxim Likhachev

Bayesian model-based reinforcement learning is a formally elegant approach to learning optimal behaviour under model uncertainty, trading off exploration and exploitation in an ideal way. Unfortunately, finding the resulting Bayes-optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-20 Arthur Guez , David Silver , Peter Dayan

We study the problem of efficient exploration in order to learn an accurate model of an environment, modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP). Efficient exploration in this problem requires the agent to identify the regions in which…

Is there a canonical way to think of agency beyond reward maximisation? In this paper, we show that any type of behaviour complying with physically sound assumptions about how macroscopic biological agents interact with the world…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Lancelot Da Costa , Samuel Tenka , Dominic Zhao , Noor Sajid

Effective and intelligent exploration has been an unresolved problem for reinforcement learning. Most contemporary reinforcement learning relies on simple heuristic strategies such as $\epsilon$-greedy exploration or adding Gaussian noise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Muhammad Usama , Dong Eui Chang

Developing autonomous agents that quickly explore an environment and adapt their behavior online is a canonical challenge in robotics and machine learning. While humans are able to achieve such fast online exploration and adaptation, often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Andrew Wagenmaker , Zhiyuan Zhou , Sergey Levine

To rapidly learn a new task, it is often essential for agents to explore efficiently -- especially when performance matters from the first timestep. One way to learn such behaviour is via meta-learning. Many existing methods however rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-11 Luisa Zintgraf , Leo Feng , Cong Lu , Maximilian Igl , Kristian Hartikainen , Katja Hofmann , Shimon Whiteson

The explore{exploit dilemma is one of the central challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Bayesian RL solves the dilemma by providing the agent with information in the form of a prior distribution over environments; however, full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-03-19 Jonathan Sorg , Satinder Singh , Richard L. Lewis

A burgeoning area within reinforcement learning (RL) is the design of sequential decision-making agents centered around large language models (LLMs). While autonomous decision-making agents powered by modern LLMs could facilitate numerous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Dilip Arumugam , Thomas L. Griffiths

Exploration is critical to a reinforcement learning agent's performance in its given environment. Prior exploration methods are often based on using heuristic auxiliary predictions to guide policy behavior, lacking a mathematically-grounded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Lisa Lee , Benjamin Eysenbach , Emilio Parisotto , Eric Xing , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Language Model (LM) agents are increasingly used in complex open-ended decision-making tasks, from AI coding to physical AI. A core requirement in these settings is the ability to both explore the problem space and exploit acquired…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Jaden Park , Jungtaek Kim , Jongwon Jeong , Robert D. Nowak , Kangwook Lee , Yong Jae Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) is ubiquitous in the development of modern AI systems. However, state-of-the-art RL agents require extensive, and potentially unsafe, interactions with their environments to learn effectively. These limitations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Yarden As , Bhavya Sukhija , Lenart Treven , Carmelo Sferrazza , Stelian Coros , Andreas Krause

An active learning (AL) algorithm seeks to construct an effective classifier with a minimal number of labeled examples in a bootstrapping manner. While standard AL heuristics, such as selecting those points for annotation for which a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-09-03 Ishani Mondal , Debasis Ganguly

Balancing exploration and exploitation is a fundamental part of reinforcement learning, yet most state-of-the-art algorithms use a naive exploration protocol like $\epsilon$-greedy. This contributes to the problem of high sample complexity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Tom Blau , Lionel Ott , Fabio Ramos