English
Related papers

Related papers: NADPEx: An on-policy temporally consistent explora…

200 papers

We study the policy evaluation problem in an online multi-reward multi-policy discounted setting, where multiple reward functions must be evaluated simultaneously for different policies. We adopt an $(\epsilon,\delta)$-PAC perspective to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Alessio Russo , Aldo Pacchiano

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in a wide range of control and decision-making tasks. However, RL agents often exhibit unstable or degraded performance when deployed in environments subject to unexpected external…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Taeho Lee , Donghwan Lee

Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning (RL) have demonstrated notable progress in sample efficiency, spanning both model-based and model-free paradigms. Despite the identification and mitigation of specific bottlenecks in prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yibo Wang , Jiang Zhao

During initial iterations of training in most Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms, agents perform a significant number of random exploratory steps. In the real world, this can limit the practicality of these algorithms as it can lead to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-17 Ashish Kumar Jayant , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

Policy-gradient methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are typically updated along a single stochastic gradient direction, leaving the rich local structure of the parameter space unexplored. Previous work has shown that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Xinyu Zhang , Aishik Deb , Klaus Mueller

The most data-efficient algorithms for reinforcement learning in robotics are model-based policy search algorithms, which alternate between learning a dynamical model of the robot and optimizing a policy to maximize the expected return…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-05 Rituraj Kaushik , Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis , Jean-Baptiste Mouret

We propose a exploration mechanism of policy in Deep Reinforcement Learning, which is exploring more when agent needs, called Add Noise to Noise (AN2N). The core idea is: when the Deep Reinforcement Learning agent is in a state of poor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-29 Youtian Guo , Qi Gao

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

Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Max Simchowitz , Tiancheng Yu

This paper investigates conservative exploration in reinforcement learning where the performance of the learning agent is guaranteed to be above a certain threshold throughout the learning process. It focuses on the tabular episodic Markov…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Donghao Li , Ruiquan Huang , Cong Shen , Jing Yang

Reinforcement learning for large language models faces a fundamental trade-off between sample efficiency and asymptotic performance: strictly on-policy methods discard trajectories after a single update, while off-policy reuse introduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Changyu Chen , Xiting Wang , Rui Yan

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

Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Andreas Doerr , Michael Volpp , Marc Toussaint , Sebastian Trimpe , Christian Daniel

An agent learning through interactions should balance its action selection process between probing the environment to discover new rewards and using the information acquired in the past to adopt useful behaviour. This trade-off is usually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-02 Lucas Beyer , Damien Vincent , Olivier Teboul , Sylvain Gelly , Matthieu Geist , Olivier Pietquin

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

Proximal Policy Optimization with Adaptive Exploration (axPPO) is introduced as a novel learning algorithm. This paper investigates the exploration-exploitation tradeoff within the context of reinforcement learning and aims to contribute…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Andrei Lixandru

In continuous control, exploration is often performed through undirected strategies in which parameters of the networks or selected actions are perturbed by random noise. Although the deep setting of undirected exploration has been shown to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Baturay Saglam , Suleyman S. Kozat

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

On-policy reinforcement learning methods like GRPO suffer from mode collapse: they exhibit reduced solution diversity, concentrating probability mass on a single solution once discovered and ceasing exploration of alternative strategies. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Xiaozhe Li , Yang Li , Xinyu Fang , Shengyuan Ding , Peiji Li , Yongkang Chen , Yichuan Ma , Tianyi Lyu , Linyang Li , Dahua Lin , Qipeng Guo , Qingwen Liu , Kai Chen