Related papers: Discovering Options for Exploration by Minimizing …
In this paper, a sparse Markov decision process (MDP) with novel causal sparse Tsallis entropy regularization is proposed.The proposed policy regularization induces a sparse and multi-modal optimal policy distribution of a sparse MDP. The…
A basic simulation-based reinforcement learning algorithm is the Monte Carlo Exploring States (MCES) method, also known as optimistic policy iteration, in which the value function is approximated by simulated returns and a greedy policy is…
Dealing with sparse rewards is one of the biggest challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL). We present a novel technique called Hindsight Experience Replay which allows sample-efficient learning from rewards which are sparse and binary and…
Exploration under sparse reward is a long-standing challenge of model-free reinforcement learning. The state-of-the-art methods address this challenge by introducing intrinsic rewards to encourage exploration in novel states or uncertain…
Learning complex robot behavior through interactions with the environment necessitates principled exploration. Effective strategies should prioritize exploring regions of the state-action space that maximize rewards, with optimistic…
In online reinforcement learning (RL), efficient exploration remains particularly challenging in high-dimensional environments with sparse rewards. In low-dimensional environments, where tabular parameterization is possible, count-based…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are widely used in modeling decision making problems in stochastic environments. However, precise specification of the reward functions in MDPs is often very difficult. Recent approaches have focused on…
Myopic exploration policies such as epsilon-greedy, softmax, or Gaussian noise fail to explore efficiently in some reinforcement learning tasks and yet, they perform well in many others. In fact, in practice, they are often selected as the…
Learning a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from a fixed batch of trajectories is a non-trivial task whose outcome's quality depends on both the amount and the diversity of the sampled regions of the state-action space. Yet, many MDPs are…
Policy optimization is a widely-used method in reinforcement learning. Due to its local-search nature, however, theoretical guarantees on global optimality often rely on extra assumptions on the Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that bypass…
While recent progress in deep reinforcement learning has enabled robots to learn complex behaviors, tasks with long horizons and sparse rewards remain an ongoing challenge. In this work, we propose an effective reward shaping method through…
Reinforcement learning agents need exploratory behaviors to escape from local optima. These behaviors may include both immediate dithering perturbation and temporally consistent exploration. To achieve these, a stochastic policy model that…
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,…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms aim to balance exploiting the current best strategy with exploring new options that could lead to higher rewards. Most common RL algorithms use undirected exploration, i.e., select random sequences of…
We introduce Self-supervised Online Reward Shaping (SORS), which aims to improve the sample efficiency of any RL algorithm in sparse-reward environments by automatically densifying rewards. The proposed framework alternates between…
The ability to explore efficiently and effectively is a central challenge of reinforcement learning. In this work, we consider exploration through the lens of information theory. Specifically, we cast exploration as a problem of maximizing…
The problem of offline reinforcement learning focuses on learning a good policy from a log of environment interactions. Past efforts for developing algorithms in this area have revolved around introducing constraints to online reinforcement…
The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient…
We study learning in periodic Markov Decision Process (MDP), a special type of non-stationary MDP where both the state transition probabilities and reward functions vary periodically, under the average reward maximization setting. We…
The problem of selecting the right state-representation in a reinforcement learning problem is considered. Several models (functions mapping past observations to a finite set) of the observations are given, and it is known that for at least…