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Related papers: Efficient Exploration via State Marginal Matching

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Large language model based agents often fail in unfamiliar environments due to premature exploitation: a tendency to act on prior knowledge before acquiring sufficient environment-specific information. We identify autonomous exploration as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Ziang Ye , Wentao Shi , Yuxin Liu , Yu Wang , Zhengzhou Cai , Yaorui Shi , Qi Gu , Xunliang Cai , Fuli Feng

Policy search reinforcement learning allows robots to acquire skills by themselves. However, the learning procedure is inherently unsafe as the robot has no a-priori way to predict the consequences of the exploratory actions it takes.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-10-09 Jens Lundell , Robert Krug , Erik Schaffernicht , Todor Stoyanov , Ville Kyrki

Several machine learning applications involve the optimization of higher-order derivatives (e.g., gradients of gradients) during training, which can be expensive in respect to memory and computation even with automatic differentiation. As a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-26 Tianyu Pang , Kun Xu , Chongxuan Li , Yang Song , Stefano Ermon , Jun Zhu

Accurate reconstruction of the environment is a central goal of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems. However, the agent's trajectory can significantly affect estimation accuracy. This paper presents a new method to model…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Sebastian Sansoni , Javier Gimenez , Gastón Castro , Santiago Tosetti , Flavio Craparo

This work presents a modular and hierarchical approach to learn policies for exploring 3D environments, called `Active Neural SLAM'. Our approach leverages the strengths of both classical and learning-based methods, by using analytical path…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-04-13 Devendra Singh Chaplot , Dhiraj Gandhi , Saurabh Gupta , Abhinav Gupta , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) requires agents to discover joint strategies in a combinatorially large state-action space, yet effective coordination configurations are exceedingly rare. Intrinsic motivation, which…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Dahyun Oh , Minhyuk Yoon , H. Jin Kim

Cooperative games are those in which both agents share the same payoff structure. Value-based reinforcement-learning algorithms, such as variants of Q-learning, have been applied to learning cooperative games, but they only apply when the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-25 Leonid Peshkin , Kee-Eung Kim , Nicolas Meuleau , Leslie Pack Kaelbling

Cooperative games are those in which both agents share the same payoff structure. Value-based reinforcement-learning algorithms, such as variants of Q-learning, have been applied to learning cooperative games, but they only apply when the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-08-08 Leonid Peshkin , Kee-Eung Kim , Nicolas Meuleau , Leslie Pack Kaelbling

The goal of meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) is to build agents that can quickly learn new tasks by leveraging prior experience on related tasks. Learning a new task often requires both exploring to gather task-relevant information and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-15 Evan Zheran Liu , Aditi Raghunathan , Percy Liang , Chelsea Finn

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods have achieved state-of-the-art results on a range of multi-agent tasks. Yet, MARL algorithms typically require significantly more environment interactions than their single-agent…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-17 Tom Danino , Nahum Shimkin

Effective decision-making in Large Language Models (LLMs) is essential for handling intricate tasks. However, existing approaches prioritize performance but often overlook the balance between effectiveness and computational cost. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jiawei Gu , Shangsong Liang

In robot manipulation, Reinforcement Learning (RL) often suffers from low sample efficiency and uncertain convergence, especially in large observation and action spaces. Foundation Models (FMs) offer an alternative, demonstrating promise in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Runyu Ma , Jelle Luijkx , Zlatan Ajanovic , Jens Kober

The policy gradient approach is a flexible and powerful reinforcement learning method particularly for problems with continuous actions such as robot control. A common challenge in this scenario is how to reduce the variance of policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-18 Tingting Zhao , Hirotaka Hachiya , Voot Tangkaratt , Jun Morimoto , Masashi Sugiyama

Language Model (LM) agents are increasingly used in complex open-ended decision-making tasks, from AI coding to physical AI. A core requirement in these settings is the ability to both explore the problem space and exploit acquired…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Jaden Park , Jungtaek Kim , Jongwon Jeong , Robert D. Nowak , Kangwook Lee , Yong Jae Lee

Reinforcement Learning (RL) traditionally relies on scalar reward signals, limiting its ability to leverage the rich semantic knowledge often available in real-world tasks. In contrast, humans learn efficiently by combining numerical…

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

Learning optimal policies in sparse rewards settings is difficult as the learning agent has little to no feedback on the quality of its actions. In these situations, a good strategy is to focus on exploration, hopefully leading to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Giuseppe Paolo , Miranda Coninx , Alban Laflaquière , Stephane Doncieux

Exploration in reinforcement learning is a challenging problem: in the worst case, the agent must search for high-reward states that could be hidden anywhere in the state space. Can we define a more tractable class of RL problems, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Kevin Li , Abhishek Gupta , Ashwin Reddy , Vitchyr Pong , Aurick Zhou , Justin Yu , Sergey Levine

In this paper we consider the problem of how a reinforcement learning agent that is tasked with solving a sequence of reinforcement learning problems (a sequence of Markov decision processes) can use knowledge acquired early in its lifetime…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-05 Francisco M. Garcia , Philip S. Thomas

A key challenge to deploying reinforcement learning in practice is avoiding excessive (harmful) exploration in individual episodes. We propose a natural constraint on exploration -- \textit{uniformly} outperforming a conservative policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Wanqiao Xu , Jason Yecheng Ma , Kan Xu , Hamsa Bastani , Osbert Bastani