Related papers: Discovering Options for Exploration by Minimizing …
In many sequential decision-making problems, the goal is to optimize a utility function while satisfying a set of constraints on different utilities. This learning problem is formalized through Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs).…
In online reinforcement learning, data scarcity creates epistemic uncertainty that makes robustness important early in learning, whereas sufficient exploration is needed to learn the true-environment optimal policy. We study this…
We investigate an infinite-horizon average reward Markov Decision Process (MDP) with delayed, composite, and partially anonymous reward feedback. The delay and compositeness of rewards mean that rewards generated as a result of taking an…
Acquiring abilities in the absence of a task-oriented reward function is at the frontier of reinforcement learning research. This problem has been studied through the lens of empowerment, which draws a connection between option discovery…
The infamous exploration-exploitation dilemma is one of the oldest and most important problems in reinforcement learning (RL). Deliberate and effective exploration is necessary for RL agents to succeed in most environments. However, until…
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…
Options have been shown to be an effective tool in reinforcement learning, facilitating improved exploration and learning. In this paper, we present an approach based on spectral graph theory and derive an algorithm that systematically…
Achieving efficient and scalable exploration in complex domains poses a major challenge in reinforcement learning. While Bayesian and PAC-MDP approaches to the exploration problem offer strong formal guarantees, they are often impractical…
Exploration is essential for reinforcement learning (RL). To face the challenges of exploration, we consider a reward-free RL framework that completely separates exploration from exploitation and brings new challenges for exploration…
We study online learning in episodic constrained Markov decision processes (CMDPs), where the learner aims at collecting as much reward as possible over the episodes, while satisfying some long-term constraints during the learning process.…
Effective exploration in reinforcement learning requires not only tracking where an agent has been, but also understanding how the agent perceives and represents the world. To learn powerful representations, an agent should actively explore…
Although Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been popular in many disciplines including robotics, state-of-the-art DRL algorithms still struggle to learn long-horizon, multi-step and sparse reward tasks, such as stacking several blocks…
The aim of this paper is to study the reward based policy exploration problem in a supervised learning approach and enable robots to form complex movement trajectories in challenging reward settings and search spaces. For this, the…
Safe reinforcement learning is extremely challenging--not only must the agent explore an unknown environment, it must do so while ensuring no safety constraint violations. We formulate this safe reinforcement learning (RL) problem using the…
This paper introduces a novel method of adding intrinsic bonuses to task-oriented reward function in order to efficiently facilitate reinforcement learning search. While various bonuses have been designed to date, they are analogous to the…
This paper studies reward-agnostic exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) -- a scenario where the learner is unware of the reward functions during the exploration stage -- and designs an algorithm that improves over the state of the…
In many real-world applications (e.g., planetary exploration, robot navigation), an autonomous agent must be able to explore a space with guaranteed safety. Most safe exploration algorithms in the field of reinforcement learning and…
Although exploration in reinforcement learning is well understood from a theoretical point of view, provably correct methods remain impractical. In this paper we study the interplay between exploration and approximation, what we call…
Modern tasks in reinforcement learning have large state and action spaces. To deal with them efficiently, one often uses predefined feature mapping to represent states and actions in a low-dimensional space. In this paper, we study…
We investigate the classical active pure exploration problem in Markov Decision Processes, where the agent sequentially selects actions and, from the resulting system trajectory, aims at identifying the best policy as fast as possible. We…