English
Related papers

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

200 papers

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

We study reinforcement learning (RL) in the setting of continuous time and space, for an infinite horizon with a discounted objective and the underlying dynamics driven by a stochastic differential equation. Built upon recent advances in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Hanyang Zhao , Wenpin Tang , David D. Yao

In lifelong learning, an agent learns throughout its entire life without resets, in a constantly changing environment, as we humans do. Consequently, lifelong learning comes with a plethora of research problems such as continual domain…

Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are among the most successful policy gradient approaches in deep reinforcement learning (RL). While these methods achieve state-of-the-art performance across a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ahmed Touati , Amy Zhang , Joelle Pineau , Pascal Vincent

We propose an actor-critic, model-free, and online Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework for continuous-state continuous-action Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) when the reward is highly sparse but encompasses a high-level temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Lim Zun Yuan , Mohammadhosein Hasanbeig , Alessandro Abate , Daniel Kroening

Efficient exploration is a long-standing problem in sensorimotor learning. Major advances have been demonstrated in noise-free, non-stochastic domains such as video games and simulation. However, most of these formulations either get stuck…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Deepak Pathak , Dhiraj Gandhi , Abhinav Gupta

Deep learning has become the state-of-art tool in many applications, but the evaluation and training of deep models can be time-consuming and computationally expensive. The conditional computation approach has been proposed to tackle this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-01-11 Emmanuel Bengio , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Joelle Pineau , Doina Precup

Although parallelism has been extensively used in reinforcement learning (RL), the quantitative effects of parallel exploration are not well understood theoretically. We study the benefits of simple parallel exploration for reward-free RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Pedro Cisneros-Velarde , Boxiang Lyu , Sanmi Koyejo , Mladen Kolar

Oftentimes, environments for sequential decision-making problems can be quite sparse in the provision of evaluative feedback to guide reinforcement-learning agents. In the extreme case, long trajectories of behavior are merely punctuated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Akash Velu , Skanda Vaidyanath , Dilip Arumugam

LLM agents have shown strong performance across a wide range of complex tasks, including interactive environments that require long-horizon decision making. But these agents cannot learn on the fly at test time. Self-evolving agents address…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Yibo Li , Jiashuo Yang , Zhi Zheng , Zhiyuan Hu , Yuan Sui , Shizun Wang , Yufei He , Bryan Hooi

This paper addresses the problem of learning optimal control policies for systems with uncertain dynamics and high-level control objectives specified as Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas. Uncertainty is considered in the workspace…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Yiannis Kantaros , Jun Wang

Exploration is essential in modern learning, from reinforcement learning environments with small neural policies to large language models (LLMs). Existing work, such as DPO, leverages full sequence log-likelihoods to capture an entire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Gaurish Trivedi , Alakh Sharma , Kartikey Singh Bhandari , Dhruv Kumar , Pratik Narang , Jagat Sesh Challa

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks where extrinsic rewards from environments are sparse or even totally disregarded. Significant advances based on intrinsic motivation show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Chenjia Bai , Peng Liu , Kaiyu Liu , Lingxiao Wang , Yingnan Zhao , Lei Han

We study the reward-free reinforcement learning framework, which is particularly suitable for batch reinforcement learning and scenarios where one needs policies for multiple reward functions. This framework has two phases. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Zihan Zhang , Simon S. Du , Xiangyang Ji

This paper introduces two novel modifications to the Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO) algorithm [1], approached from a mixed-policy perspective. Standard policy gradient methods can suffer from instability and sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Hongze Tan , Yuchen Li

Exploration is an essential part of reinforcement learning, which restricts the quality of learned policy. Hard-exploration environments are defined by huge state space and sparse rewards. In such conditions, an exhaustive exploration of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-22 Leonid Ugadiarov , Alexey Skrynnik , Aleksandr I. Panov

We introduce Random Latent Exploration (RLE), a simple yet effective exploration strategy in reinforcement learning (RL). On average, RLE outperforms noise-based methods, which perturb the agent's actions, and bonus-based exploration, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Srinath Mahankali , Zhang-Wei Hong , Ayush Sekhari , Alexander Rakhlin , Pulkit Agrawal

Experience replay enables reinforcement learning agents to memorize and reuse past experiences, just as humans replay memories for the situation at hand. Contemporary off-policy algorithms either replay past experiences uniformly or utilize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-21 Daochen Zha , Kwei-Herng Lai , Kaixiong Zhou , Xia Hu

What is a good exploration strategy for an agent that interacts with an environment in the absence of external rewards? Ideally, we would like to get a policy driving towards a uniform state-action visitation (highly exploring) in a minimum…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-20 Mirco Mutti , Marcello Restelli

Learning effective policies for sparse objectives is a key challenge in Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). A common approach is to design task-related dense rewards to improve task learnability. While such rewards are easily interpreted,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-12 Hassam Sheikh , Shauharda Khadka , Santiago Miret , Somdeb Majumdar