English
Related papers

Related papers: Discovering Options for Exploration by Minimizing …

200 papers

One major limitation to the applicability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to many practical domains is the large number of samples required to learn an optimal policy. To address this problem and improve learning efficiency, we consider a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-07 Roberto Cipollone , Giuseppe De Giacomo , Marco Favorito , Luca Iocchi , Fabio Patrizi

Reinforcement learning in sparse-reward navigation environments with expensive and limited interactions is challenging and poses a need for effective exploration. Motivated by complex navigation tasks that require real-world training (when…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-13 Yijia Wang , Matthias Poloczek , Daniel R. Jiang

Reinforcement Learning algorithms are primarily focused on learning a policy that maximizes expected return. As a result, the learned policy can exploit one or few reward sources. However, in many natural situations, it is desirable to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Sagalpreet Singh , Rishi Saket , Aravindan Raghuveer

This paper proposes a formal approach to online learning and planning for agents operating in a priori unknown, time-varying environments. The proposed method computes the maximally likely model of the environment, given the observations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Melkior Ornik , Ufuk Topcu

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is still an open challenge. Classic methods rely on getting feedback via extrinsic rewards to train the agent, and in situations where this occurs very rarely the agent learns slowly or cannot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Simone Parisi , Davide Tateo , Maximilian Hensel , Carlo D'Eramo , Jan Peters , Joni Pajarinen

Realistic environments often provide agents with very limited feedback. When the environment is initially unknown, the feedback, in the beginning, can be completely absent, and the agents may first choose to devote all their effort on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Pierre Ménard , Omar Darwiche Domingues , Anders Jonsson , Emilie Kaufmann , Edouard Leurent , Michal Valko

Exploration is an extremely challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially in high dimensional state and action spaces and when only sparse rewards are available. Effective representations can indicate which components of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Giulia Vezzani , Abhishek Gupta , Lorenzo Natale , Pieter Abbeel

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

This paper proposes a novel learning-based framework for autonomous driving based on the concept of maximal safety probability. Efficient learning requires rewards that are informative of desirable/undesirable states, but such rewards are…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Hikaru Hoshino , Jiaxing Li , Arnav Menon , John M. Dolan , Yorie Nakahira

A tenet of reinforcement learning is that the agent always observes rewards. However, this is not true in many realistic settings, e.g., a human observer may not always be available to provide rewards, sensors may be limited or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Alireza Kazemipour , Simone Parisi , Matthew E. Taylor , Michael Bowling

In reward-free reinforcement learning (RL), an agent explores the environment first without any reward information, in order to achieve certain learning goals afterwards for any given reward. In this paper we focus on reward-free RL under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Yuan Cheng , Ruiquan Huang , Jing Yang , Yingbin Liang

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 recent years Landmark Complexes have been successfully employed for localization-free and metric-free autonomous exploration using a group of sensing-limited and communication-limited robots in a GPS-denied environment. To ensure rapid…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-09-27 Xiatao Sun , Yuwei Wu , Subhrajit Bhattacharya , Vijay Kumar

To achieve sample efficiency in reinforcement learning (RL), it necessitates efficiently exploring the underlying environment. Under the offline setting, addressing the exploration challenge lies in collecting an offline dataset with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Shuang Qiu , Jieping Ye , Zhaoran Wang , Zhuoran Yang

In traditional reinforcement learning (RL), the learner aims to solve a single objective optimization problem: find the policy that maximizes expected reward. However, in many real-world settings, it is important to optimize over multiple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Eric Eaton , Marcel Hussing , Michael Kearns , Aaron Roth , Sikata Bela Sengupta , Jessica Sorrell

We consider online reinforcement learning in episodic Markov decision process (MDP) with unknown transition function and stochastic rewards drawn from some fixed but unknown distribution. The learner aims to learn the optimal policy and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Vincent Leon , S. Rasoul Etesami

Sparse rewards and long time horizons remain challenging for reinforcement learning algorithms. Exploration bonuses can help in sparse reward settings by encouraging agents to explore the state space, while hierarchical approaches can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-08-13 Willie McClinton , Andrew Levy , George Konidaris

The promise of reinforcement learning is to solve complex sequential decision problems autonomously by specifying a high-level reward function only. However, reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when, as is often the case, simple and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-09-17 Adrien Ecoffet , Joost Huizinga , Joel Lehman , Kenneth O. Stanley , Jeff Clune

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

The key assumption underlying linear Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) is that the learner has access to a known feature map $\phi(x, a)$ that maps state-action pairs to $d$-dimensional vectors, and that the rewards and transitions are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-20 Noah Golowich , Ankur Moitra , Dhruv Rohatgi