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Related papers: Exploration Conscious Reinforcement Learning Revis…

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A fundamental issue in reinforcement learning algorithms is the balance between exploration of the environment and exploitation of information already obtained by the agent. Especially, exploration has played a critical role for both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Ruihan Yang , Qiwei Ye , Tie-Yan Liu

We consider a class of reinforcement-learning systems in which the agent follows a behavior policy to explore a discrete state-action space to find an optimal policy while adhering to some restriction on its behavior. Such restriction may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-07 Peter C. Y. Chen

Several recent works have been dedicated to unsupervised reinforcement learning in a single environment, in which a policy is first pre-trained with unsupervised interactions, and then fine-tuned towards the optimal policy for several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-17 Mirco Mutti , Mattia Mancassola , Marcello Restelli

Exploration is an essential component of reinforcement learning algorithms, where agents need to learn how to predict and control unknown and often stochastic environments. Reinforcement learning agents depend crucially on exploration to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Susan Amin , Maziar Gomrokchi , Harsh Satija , Herke van Hoof , Doina Precup

We present a new model-based algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) which consists of explicit exploration and exploitation phases, and is applicable in large or infinite state spaces. The algorithm maintains a set of dynamics models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Mikael Henaff

In this paper, we develop a dynamic exploration/ exploitation (exr/exp) strategy for contextual recommender systems (CRS). Specifically, our methods can adaptively balance the two aspects of exr/exp by automatically learning the optimal…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2014-04-16 Djallel Bouneffouf

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

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

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

In order to compute near-optimal policies with policy-gradient algorithms, it is common in practice to include intrinsic exploration terms in the learning objective. Although the effectiveness of these terms is usually justified by an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Adrien Bolland , Gaspard Lambrechts , Damien Ernst

Recent advancements in agentic test-time scaling allow models to gather environmental feedback before committing to final actions. A key limitation of existing methods is that they typically employ undifferentiated exploration strategies,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Xingyuan Hua , Sheng Yue , Ju Ren

A precondition for the deployment of a Reinforcement Learning agent to a real-world system is to provide guarantees on the learning process. While a learning algorithm will eventually converge to a good policy, there are no guarantees on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-27 Paul Daoudi , Mathias Formoso , Othman Gaizi , Achraf Azize , Evrard Garcelon

Equipping artificial agents with useful exploration mechanisms remains a challenge to this day. Humans, on the other hand, seem to manage the trade-off between exploration and exploitation effortlessly. In the present article, we put…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Marcel Binz , Eric Schulz

Reinforcement Learning is a powerful tool to model decision-making processes. However, it relies on an exploration-exploitation trade-off that remains an open challenge for many tasks. In this work, we study neighboring state-based,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Yu-Teng Li , Justin Lin , Jeffery Cheng , Pedro Pachuca

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…

Controllable Markov chains describe the dynamics of sequential decision making tasks and are the central component in optimal control and reinforcement learning. In this work, we give the general form of an optimal policy for learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Peter N. Loxley

All reinforcement learning algorithms must handle the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Many state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning methods use noise in the action selection, such as Gaussian noise in policy gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-05 Trevor Barron , Oliver Obst , Heni Ben Amor

Autonomous 3D environment exploration is a fundamental task for various applications such as navigation. The goal of exploration is to investigate a new environment and build its occupancy map efficiently. In this paper, we propose a new…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Liu Juncheng , McCane Brendan , Mills Steven

Reinforcement learning systems are often concerned with balancing exploration of untested actions against exploitation of actions that are known to be good. The benefit of exploration can be estimated using the classical notion of Value of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-01-30 Richard Dearden , Nir Friedman , David Andre

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