Related papers: Exploration versus exploitation in reinforcement l…
State-of-the-art reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically use random sampling (e.g., $\epsilon$-greedy) for exploration, but this method fails on hard exploration tasks like Montezuma's Revenge. To address the challenge of…
The imbalance of exploration and exploitation has long been a significant challenge in reinforcement learning. In policy optimization, excessive reliance on exploration reduces learning efficiency, while over-dependence on exploitation…
Efficient allocation is important in nature and human society, where individuals frequently compete for limited resources. The Minority Game (MG) is perhaps the simplest toy model to address this issue. However, most previous solutions…
Commonly in reinforcement learning (RL), rewards are discounted over time using an exponential function to model time preference, thereby bounding the expected long-term reward. In contrast, in economics and psychology, it has been shown…
The exploration-exploitation trade-off is among the central challenges of reinforcement learning. The optimal Bayesian solution is intractable in general. This paper studies to what extent analytic statements about optimal learning are…
The exploration \& exploitation dilemma poses significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, curiosity-based exploration methods achieved great success in tackling hard-exploration problems. However, they necessitate…
Many potential applications of reinforcement learning (RL) are stymied by the large numbers of samples required to learn an effective policy. This is especially true when applying RL to real-world control tasks, e.g. in the sciences or…
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…
This paper establishes a rigorous connection between regularized discrete-time reinforcement learning (RL) and continuous-time stochastic optimal control. Specifically, classical RL algorithms are typically solving a regularized…
We address the challenge of exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) when the agent operates in an unknown environment with sparse or no rewards. In this work, we study the maximum entropy exploration problem of two different types. The…
Reinforcement learning algorithms rely on exploration to discover new behaviors, which is typically achieved by following a stochastic policy. In continuous control tasks, policies with a Gaussian distribution have been widely adopted.…
The optimal execution problem has always been a continuously focused research issue, and many reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been studied. In this article, we consider the execution problem of targeting the volume weighted…
Efficient exploration remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning, serving as a useful pretraining objective for data collection, particularly when an external reward function is unavailable. A principled formulation of the…
This paper bridges some of the gap between optimal planning and reinforcement learning (RL), both of which share roots in dynamic programming applied to sequential decision making or optimal control. Whereas planning typically favors…
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…
This paper applies a reinforcement learning (RL) method to solve infinite horizon continuous-time stochastic linear quadratic problems, where drift and diffusion terms in the dynamics may depend on both the state and control. Based on…
Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) extracts knowledge from previous tasks and achieves fast adaptation to new tasks. Despite recent progress, efficient exploration in meta-RL remains a key challenge in sparse-reward tasks, as it requires…
This paper studies the continuous-time reinforcement learning for stochastic singular control with the application to an infinite-horizon irreversible reinsurance problems. The singular control is equivalently characterized as a pair of…
We study optimal control in models with latent factors where the agent controls the distribution over actions, rather than actions themselves, in both discrete and continuous time. To encourage exploration of the state space, we reward…
The naive application of Reinforcement Learning algorithms to continuous control problems -- such as locomotion and manipulation -- often results in policies which rely on high-amplitude, high-frequency control signals, known colloquially…