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In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Grigorii Veviurko , Wendelin Böhmer , Mathijs de Weerdt

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become the standard paradigm for LLM mathematical reasoning, where Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) serves as the mainstream algorithm. We point out two understudied…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Mingxiong Lin , Zhangquan Gong , Maowen Tang , Qian Li , Chuangchuang Wang , Jian Ma , Sutian Huang , Kai Tang , Haonan Lu

Resolving the exploration-exploitation trade-off remains a fundamental problem in the design and implementation of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. In this paper, we focus on model-free RL using the epsilon-greedy exploration policy,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-03 Michael Gimelfarb , Scott Sanner , Chi-Guhn Lee

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an effective approach for solving optimal control problems without knowing the exact information of the system model. However, the classical Q-learning method, a model-free RL algorithm, has its limitations,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-04 Xiushan Jiang , Weihai Zhang

In practice, the parameters of control policies are often tuned manually. This is time-consuming and frustrating. Reinforcement learning is a promising alternative that aims to automate this process, yet often requires too many experiments…

In this paper, we study a continuous-time exploratory mean-variance (EMV) problem under the framework of reinforcement learning (RL), and the Choquet regularizers are used to measure the level of exploration. By applying the classical…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-07 Junyi Guo , Xia Han , Hao Wang

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

Bugs in popular distributed protocol implementations have been the source of many downtimes in popular internet services. We describe a randomized testing approach for distributed protocol implementations based on reinforcement learning.…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Andrea Borgarelli , Constantin Enea , Rupak Majumdar , Srinidhi Nagendra

Safe exploration presents a major challenge in reinforcement learning (RL): when active data collection requires deploying partially trained policies, we must ensure that these policies avoid catastrophically unsafe regions, while still…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Homanga Bharadhwaj , Aviral Kumar , Nicholas Rhinehart , Sergey Levine , Florian Shkurti , Animesh Garg

Many problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL) seek an optimal policy with large discrete multidimensional yet unordered action spaces; these include problems in randomized allocation of resources such as placements of multiple security…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Changyu Chen , Ramesha Karunasena , Thanh Hong Nguyen , Arunesh Sinha , Pradeep Varakantham

Maximum entropy reinforcement learning integrates exploration into policy learning by providing additional intrinsic rewards proportional to the entropy of some distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel approach in which the intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims at learning an optimal control from a fixed dataset, without interactions with the system. An agent in this setting should avoid selecting actions whose consequences cannot be predicted from the…

Despite the close connection between exploration and sample efficiency, most state of the art reinforcement learning algorithms include no considerations for exploration beyond maximizing the entropy of the policy. In this work we address…

We study the problem of learning exploration-exploitation strategies that effectively adapt to dynamic environments, where the task may change over time. While RNN-based policies could in principle represent such strategies, in practice…

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been proven its efficiency in capturing users' dynamic interests in recent literature. However, training a DRL agent is challenging, because of the sparse environment in recommender systems (RS), DRL…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Xiaocong Chen , Siyu Wang , Lina Yao , Lianyong Qi , Yong Li

Optimism in the face of uncertainty is a popular approach to balance exploration and exploitation in reinforcement learning. Here, we consider the online linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem, i.e., to learn the LQR corresponding to an…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-01 Marcell Bartos , Bruce D. Lee , Lenart Treven , Andreas Krause , Florian Dörfler , Melanie N. Zeilinger

We study reinforcement learning from human feedback in general Markov decision processes, where agents learn from trajectory-level preference comparisons. A central challenge in this setting is to design algorithms that select informative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Reda Ouhamma , Maryam Kamgarpour

Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) enhances the understanding of the effects of the randomness in the environment by letting agents learn the distribution of a random return, rather than its expected value as in standard RL. At the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-27 Zifan Wang , Yulong Gao , Siyi Wang , Michael M. Zavlanos , Alessandro Abate , Karl H. Johansson

The inherent uncertainty in the environmental transition model of Reinforcement Learning (RL) necessitates a delicate balance between exploration and exploitation. This balance is crucial for optimizing computational resources to accurately…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Yongxin Deng , Xihe Qiu , Jue Chen , Xiaoyu Tan

Ensuring sufficient exploration is a central challenge when training meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) agents to solve novel environments. Conventional solutions to the exploration-exploitation dilemma inject explicit incentives such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Micah Rentschler , Jesse Roberts